For the average user, not the technical wizz-kid: the average user, Linux was never an option. Id didn't come on their store-bought PC. If didn't "just work" (ever!) and it didn't support most of the peripherals or USB devices that they had or wanted. Blaming Linux's failure to penetrate the average household on anything but it's own lack of marketing, polish, self-discipline, ease of use, support, brand (i.e. not having a million different distros: all the same, but different) or integration is simply an exercise in self-deception.
OS-X is what Linux could have been if it hadn't fragmented, if it had been properly packaged and supported, if the developers had put some emphasis on ease-of-use instead of "cool features" and obscure options and if it had worked with all the printers, cameras, phones, webcams and scanners that the average user just wants to plug in and have work - immediately and fully.
If Linux teaches us anything, it's that users will pick integration, polish and design over "free" any day of the week.
Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts,
Science is about explaining things, not cataloging facts. If the guy thinks that the facts are the important bit, he's lost his way somewhere. Facts are the questions, theories are their answer and "science" is really the process of creating theories and disproving them. Hopefully replacing old theories with better or more refined ones. It's not about being able to recite the properties of a given thing, person or animal (those can be looked up).
Since everyone has their own collection of (digital) words and music, it's unlikely that you will suddenly develop a taste for someone-else's just because they've died and left you theirs. You may have a brief look through it, to see if it contains anything you've missed from your own collection, or you may hang on to it as a way to handle your grief.
However you may also decide to delete the whole lot, unseen, just in case it contains the sort of "material" you'd prefer not to remember your departed loved one by.
It takes a lot of time, preparation and MONEY to disappear permanently and effectively. You need a separate identity that already has a well-established "legend" and has no links of any sort to anyone in your "old" life. You can't just do that at the snap of a finger. It would take years to build up your "other you": credit rating, job history, you'd need to be running 2 homes some distance apart and in this day of FB tagging you'd need to make sure you weren't involved with anyone who owned a smartphone.
If a medical person uses an app and takes an action (or chooses not to act) on the basis of information they got from an app, who's liable for anything that goes wrong? I would expect that the medic in question would get the blame and I'd also be surprised if their professional insurance would kick in to pay for any damages that ensued.
I would also expect that any professional organisation would be advising its member to NOT use any app that had not passed some sort of approval regime. So on that basis, ignoring advice and using an unqualified device would leave the medic not only open to litigation, but without any professional support.
Question: would you be willing to fly on a plane where the pilot was using some old stuff they'd pulled off a marketplace, to fly by? The same sort of questions should be asked of medical personnel.
The best thing the Gnome project could do is start cutting features. Get rid of the bloat. Cut out of the complexity. Drop most of the "features" and come back when they have a simple, well designed, reliable and FAST desktop environment. After that, purge the people who got the project into the state it's in now.
The problem with freeware is that people will only volunteer to contribute stuff they're interested in. That normally means stuff the developer thinks is cool, or that they think is clever (more to do with personal vanity and bragging rights than any consideration for the end user). As it turns out, most users don't want that garbage - they just want something that does the basics, does it well and doesn't mean they need a multi-cored processor just to provide enough cycles to run the UI.
If yo read it, then your desire to read has come back. If you don't finish it then you're really just kidding yourself - so no amount of technology will re-kindle (groan, no pun intended) your earlier love of reading. Either you want to read, in which case yo will, or you don't. Simply buying a new toy won't kickstart it. But I reckon you already knew that.
It's not uncommon for this to happen and apparently, it's legal.
A fitness centre near here sold "lifetime memberships" and after 5 years, cancelled them. They duly got taken to court and the judge ruled in favour of the fitness centre. You might possibly be able to argue that if the supplier had known at the time of selling these "lifetime" products that they would withdraw them after a short time, there was a fraud, or mis-seling, or false advertising - but it would be difficult to prove and probably not the case, anyway.
This is just another phrase that changes its meaning where money and profit are involved. Just like "unlimited" (broadband), "free speech" and "our customers are important to us".
If you don't want us to publish your information, we'll have to charge you. That sounds a lot like "If you don't want to see those pictures in the papers, it's cost $$$$". The big difference is that (at least in fiction) the blackmailer only extorts you once. Now I can see that there could possib;y be a one-off cost to removing a name from a default of "publish". But to keep charging, every month? Nah!
Great idea. Fire off a missile with an HE head. Decide en-route that you didn't really mean it, after all. Fly large, explosive missile back to your own launch site. Watch friendly ground forces scatter as weapon approaches.
Sure, online sources mean a lot of people will get to write "Hello World\n" in many different languages - but so what?
Most of those languages will wither on the vine as there is no widespread support for them, no major pieces of software written in them and the skills base is so dilute (10 million "users" spread across 7 billion people? sounds like homeopathic programming - even if they are all connected on the internet) that it's in no employers interests to invest in it.
The languages that are successful are the ones operating systems are written in. The ones that databases are implemented in - that software with a lifespan measured in decades use. Those are the foundation of the IT industry and the languages that will provide most of the employment to developers.
However, so far as novelty goes, the new languages that will be successful are the ones the will permit new ways of working, provide new features and/or solve the new problems that we will encounter.
So learn your trendy new languages - the ones that some professor somewhere gets a nice little kickback from recommending some obscure learning material for. But you're almost certainly wasting your time if you expect to earn a living from it in the years after you graduate.
If all it took to turn a bunch of dullards into software superstars was a ton of free food, then every company would be piling in (and putting on the pounds). No, having a positive working environment ends with positive reinforcement. It starts with a hierarchy that values and promotes good ideas and doesn't do what most organisations spend their time doing: coming up with reasons why they won't work.
Hopefully her next action will be to purge the middle layers of the organisation and lose all the naysayers who have no clue how, or desire, to innovate.
If governments continue fighting "cyber wars" - or trying to hack other governments' strategic assets, then we can expect more countries to decide not to play. So while it may seem like a good idea to attack countries that a particular government decides it doesn't like, the end result won't hurt that country's rulers at all. In fact the lasting effect could (if handled properly by the "victim's" government-run news agency - and there won;t be many others left when the internet goes <pop>) be that the attacker will be portrayed to the people as the aggressor - THEY killed OUR internet.
It's highly unlikely that any government or military institution would be damaged by a country taking itself off the internet, but it WILL stop (or at least make it a dam' sight harder) anyone outside getting information or intelligence about the popular feeling inside that country and it would stop any oppressed group from appealing for outside help.
All that will happen is that by attacking a foreign power by means of hacking it's internet connected assets, its people will suffer, its democracy will be damaged and "intelligence" will become less reliable and harder to obtain.
The keepers of copyright could only "win" if they get public sentiment on their side - an attribute they have never managed to achieve and don't seem to value.
While high-profile people (politicians, the press) occasionally pontificate about how "bad" piracy is - frequently under pressure from the vested interests who pull their strings, none of the ordinary people actually believe, or care.
The biggest reason that the general public are not on the side of defending copyright is partly because of the adversarial attitude the BIG media adopt, partly because BIG media are not seen as being sympathetic to their artists - who don't get to see much, if any, benefit from additional copyright fee collections, but mostly because ordinary people can't see any benefit to themselves.
If the copyright holders were to take a more sensible, open approach and show a direct link between the copyright fees they collect and real artists (not multi-millionaire celebs) making a living from those royalties - with maybe a small "fee" taken by the media businesses themselves, then I reckon the public would view copyright fees like restaurant tips - directly benefitting the people who merit them, rather than just buying a few more snorts of coke for some anonymous fat-cats.
Space missions (and pretty much everything that a government spends money on) cost as much as you've got. If you have a $1Bn budget, they'll cost $1Bn. Whether you get $1Bn of value from spending that (or whether your $70M Mars shot will do what it's supposed to) is an altogether different question.
You're looking at this all wrong. Fuel is cheap to manufacture but it's incredibly expensive to carry up to orbit. Especially when the only reason for doing so is because your engines are so badly designed that they waste a lot of fuel in the early stages of flight. In that respect, trying to pinch pennies on engine design, materials and production is a false economy - unless your even more precious commodity is development time, as with the "space race".
If you plan to productionise getting to LEO, it's much better to device a system with the lowest overall cost: that would include not just the cost of the fuel, but the vehicle (disposable/reusable) as well.
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines?
Even considering going back to a 40+ year-old design is an admission of failure - pretty typical for government funded projects, when compared to the private sector.
Compare that with all the innovation (admittedly, spurred on by an almost constant state of war) in the 'plane industry. 60 years stood between wooden biplanes and the Jumbo Jet and the US government is now saying that the best way to resurrect their space programme is to start making the rocketry equivalent of a DC-3, again.
From FB's point of view the IPO was a success. They sold all the shares they put up for offer and got a very good price. If anyone made a mistake it was the people who bought them at the original $38, not the company that managed to sell them all.
If the company hasn't lived up to the expectations of the suckers who bought it, well: tough - that's capitalism for you.
None of those questions are relevant as the board is not available to buy. The company only made (or obtained) a small batch which have all been allocated.
Looking at the photo of the board, it's obvious from its shape that it was designed to fit inside sort sort of gadget. So presumably these boards came from the gadget-maker - either as rejects, unsellable gadgets or as surplus/bankrupt stock. Whether there'll ever be any more would depend on the success of the original gadget these were used to make.
VIA have already promoted the APC [ http://www.apc.io/ ] which was open for preorder and is now closed / sold-out. Although most of these devices, being simply bare boards, are completely unsuitable for domestic use and even more unsuitable for classroom use they might just make developers take the ARM / Linux platform seriously. I would hope that will be the takeaway from this whole initiative: that there's more to computing than PCs - oh, yeah, and apples too.
The example cited is just a textbook failure to consult properly. Every client *knows* exactly what they want - until you ask them "what about...." in which case they'll think again, or challenge their conflicting desires: "you can't have it easy to use AND infinitely flexible". Repeat that loop until the end of time and you STILL won't get a hard set of requirements - let alone a sensible or possible set.
Every experienced designer knows that the customer always lies. They might not know they're lying (or they may well do) but they will NOT tell you the truth, simply because they don't know it yet. The job of a designer is not to write down all the wishes, hopes and dreams that exit the mouth of the client, it's to present them with a list of what's possible, what's necessary and what can be done within the constraints (time, money, skills) that exist.
In the end it doesn't matter what methodologies you use. Good, talented, motivated developers will get the job done no matter what processes or obstacles you put in their way. Lazy, stupid, demotivated or confused developers will never finish the work
The OP is confused. Rich people don't care what speed they go at, but they HATE to be kept waiting. So, provided they can use their travelling time productively the speed of getting from A to B is immaterial - within common-sense boundaries. That's why so many of them have drivers (who DO obey speed limits - safety is more important the richer you become).
Anyway, the truly rich don't travel - people come to them.
I think the OP is simply projecting their own impatience.
We know that any piece of personal technology that CAN support advertising WILL be used for that purpose - whether we want it to, or not. Imagine how intrusive it would be to be using the Google Glass technology to look at something and suddenly an ad. pops up trying to sell us something that looks like what we're looking at.
What's even worse will be the privacy issues. Not only will advertisers be able to track the users as they can now, with 3G, Wifi and BT triangulation, but they'll be able to infiltrate our state of mind by interpreting what or who we're looking at.
Slashdot Mirror
For the average user, not the technical wizz-kid: the average user, Linux was never an option. Id didn't come on their store-bought PC. If didn't "just work" (ever!) and it didn't support most of the peripherals or USB devices that they had or wanted. Blaming Linux's failure to penetrate the average household on anything but it's own lack of marketing, polish, self-discipline, ease of use, support, brand (i.e. not having a million different distros: all the same, but different) or integration is simply an exercise in self-deception.
OS-X is what Linux could have been if it hadn't fragmented, if it had been properly packaged and supported, if the developers had put some emphasis on ease-of-use instead of "cool features" and obscure options and if it had worked with all the printers, cameras, phones, webcams and scanners that the average user just wants to plug in and have work - immediately and fully.
If Linux teaches us anything, it's that users will pick integration, polish and design over "free" any day of the week.
Teaching and writing only about what is known risks turning science into a mere catalog of established facts,
Science is about explaining things, not cataloging facts. If the guy thinks that the facts are the important bit, he's lost his way somewhere. Facts are the questions, theories are their answer and "science" is really the process of creating theories and disproving them. Hopefully replacing old theories with better or more refined ones. It's not about being able to recite the properties of a given thing, person or animal (those can be looked up).
However you may also decide to delete the whole lot, unseen, just in case it contains the sort of "material" you'd prefer not to remember your departed loved one by.
It takes a lot of time, preparation and MONEY to disappear permanently and effectively. You need a separate identity that already has a well-established "legend" and has no links of any sort to anyone in your "old" life. You can't just do that at the snap of a finger. It would take years to build up your "other you": credit rating, job history, you'd need to be running 2 homes some distance apart and in this day of FB tagging you'd need to make sure you weren't involved with anyone who owned a smartphone.
If a medical person uses an app and takes an action (or chooses not to act) on the basis of information they got from an app, who's liable for anything that goes wrong? I would expect that the medic in question would get the blame and I'd also be surprised if their professional insurance would kick in to pay for any damages that ensued.
I would also expect that any professional organisation would be advising its member to NOT use any app that had not passed some sort of approval regime. So on that basis, ignoring advice and using an unqualified device would leave the medic not only open to litigation, but without any professional support.
Question: would you be willing to fly on a plane where the pilot was using some old stuff they'd pulled off a marketplace, to fly by? The same sort of questions should be asked of medical personnel.
The best thing the Gnome project could do is start cutting features. Get rid of the bloat. Cut out of the complexity. Drop most of the "features" and come back when they have a simple, well designed, reliable and FAST desktop environment. After that, purge the people who got the project into the state it's in now.
The problem with freeware is that people will only volunteer to contribute stuff they're interested in. That normally means stuff the developer thinks is cool, or that they think is clever (more to do with personal vanity and bragging rights than any consideration for the end user). As it turns out, most users don't want that garbage - they just want something that does the basics, does it well and doesn't mean they need a multi-cored processor just to provide enough cycles to run the UI.
If yo read it, then your desire to read has come back. If you don't finish it then you're really just kidding yourself - so no amount of technology will re-kindle (groan, no pun intended) your earlier love of reading. Either you want to read, in which case yo will, or you don't. Simply buying a new toy won't kickstart it. But I reckon you already knew that.
It's not uncommon for this to happen and apparently, it's legal.
A fitness centre near here sold "lifetime memberships" and after 5 years, cancelled them. They duly got taken to court and the judge ruled in favour of the fitness centre. You might possibly be able to argue that if the supplier had known at the time of selling these "lifetime" products that they would withdraw them after a short time, there was a fraud, or mis-seling, or false advertising - but it would be difficult to prove and probably not the case, anyway.
This is just another phrase that changes its meaning where money and profit are involved. Just like "unlimited" (broadband), "free speech" and "our customers are important to us".
If you don't want us to publish your information, we'll have to charge you. That sounds a lot like "If you don't want to see those pictures in the papers, it's cost $$$$". The big difference is that (at least in fiction) the blackmailer only extorts you once. Now I can see that there could possib;y be a one-off cost to removing a name from a default of "publish". But to keep charging, every month? Nah!
Great idea. Fire off a missile with an HE head. Decide en-route that you didn't really mean it, after all. Fly large, explosive missile back to your own launch site. Watch friendly ground forces scatter as weapon approaches.
Brings a whole new element to "friendly fire"
It's hard to imagine a current missile counter-measure that would be effective against one of these things.
How about a large net extended to cover a potential target. Missile hits net. Missile gets tangled in net. Missile never hits target.
Cost of missile: several $million. Cost of net: a few bucks
Most of those languages will wither on the vine as there is no widespread support for them, no major pieces of software written in them and the skills base is so dilute (10 million "users" spread across 7 billion people? sounds like homeopathic programming - even if they are all connected on the internet) that it's in no employers interests to invest in it.
The languages that are successful are the ones operating systems are written in. The ones that databases are implemented in - that software with a lifespan measured in decades use. Those are the foundation of the IT industry and the languages that will provide most of the employment to developers.
However, so far as novelty goes, the new languages that will be successful are the ones the will permit new ways of working, provide new features and/or solve the new problems that we will encounter.
So learn your trendy new languages - the ones that some professor somewhere gets a nice little kickback from recommending some obscure learning material for. But you're almost certainly wasting your time if you expect to earn a living from it in the years after you graduate.
Hopefully her next action will be to purge the middle layers of the organisation and lose all the naysayers who have no clue how, or desire, to innovate.
If governments continue fighting "cyber wars" - or trying to hack other governments' strategic assets, then we can expect more countries to decide not to play. So while it may seem like a good idea to attack countries that a particular government decides it doesn't like, the end result won't hurt that country's rulers at all. In fact the lasting effect could (if handled properly by the "victim's" government-run news agency - and there won;t be many others left when the internet goes <pop>) be that the attacker will be portrayed to the people as the aggressor - THEY killed OUR internet.
It's highly unlikely that any government or military institution would be damaged by a country taking itself off the internet, but it WILL stop (or at least make it a dam' sight harder) anyone outside getting information or intelligence about the popular feeling inside that country and it would stop any oppressed group from appealing for outside help.
All that will happen is that by attacking a foreign power by means of hacking it's internet connected assets, its people will suffer, its democracy will be damaged and "intelligence" will become less reliable and harder to obtain.
While high-profile people (politicians, the press) occasionally pontificate about how "bad" piracy is - frequently under pressure from the vested interests who pull their strings, none of the ordinary people actually believe, or care.
The biggest reason that the general public are not on the side of defending copyright is partly because of the adversarial attitude the BIG media adopt, partly because BIG media are not seen as being sympathetic to their artists - who don't get to see much, if any, benefit from additional copyright fee collections, but mostly because ordinary people can't see any benefit to themselves.
If the copyright holders were to take a more sensible, open approach and show a direct link between the copyright fees they collect and real artists (not multi-millionaire celebs) making a living from those royalties - with maybe a small "fee" taken by the media businesses themselves, then I reckon the public would view copyright fees like restaurant tips - directly benefitting the people who merit them, rather than just buying a few more snorts of coke for some anonymous fat-cats.
why it costs 20-50 times more ...
Space missions (and pretty much everything that a government spends money on) cost as much as you've got. If you have a $1Bn budget, they'll cost $1Bn. Whether you get $1Bn of value from spending that (or whether your $70M Mars shot will do what it's supposed to) is an altogether different question.
Fuel is cheap, engines are expensive,
You're looking at this all wrong. Fuel is cheap to manufacture but it's incredibly expensive to carry up to orbit. Especially when the only reason for doing so is because your engines are so badly designed that they waste a lot of fuel in the early stages of flight. In that respect, trying to pinch pennies on engine design, materials and production is a false economy - unless your even more precious commodity is development time, as with the "space race".
If you plan to productionise getting to LEO, it's much better to device a system with the lowest overall cost: that would include not just the cost of the fuel, but the vehicle (disposable/reusable) as well.
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines?
Even considering going back to a 40+ year-old design is an admission of failure - pretty typical for government funded projects, when compared to the private sector. Compare that with all the innovation (admittedly, spurred on by an almost constant state of war) in the 'plane industry. 60 years stood between wooden biplanes and the Jumbo Jet and the US government is now saying that the best way to resurrect their space programme is to start making the rocketry equivalent of a DC-3, again.
If the company hasn't lived up to the expectations of the suckers who bought it, well: tough - that's capitalism for you.
Looking at the photo of the board, it's obvious from its shape that it was designed to fit inside sort sort of gadget. So presumably these boards came from the gadget-maker - either as rejects, unsellable gadgets or as surplus/bankrupt stock. Whether there'll ever be any more would depend on the success of the original gadget these were used to make.
VIA have already promoted the APC [ http://www.apc.io/ ] which was open for preorder and is now closed / sold-out. Although most of these devices, being simply bare boards, are completely unsuitable for domestic use and even more unsuitable for classroom use they might just make developers take the ARM / Linux platform seriously. I would hope that will be the takeaway from this whole initiative: that there's more to computing than PCs - oh, yeah, and apples too.
"This is exactly what we want".
The example cited is just a textbook failure to consult properly. Every client *knows* exactly what they want - until you ask them "what about ...." in which case they'll think again, or challenge their conflicting desires: "you can't have it easy to use AND infinitely flexible". Repeat that loop until the end of time and you STILL won't get a hard set of requirements - let alone a sensible or possible set.
Every experienced designer knows that the customer always lies. They might not know they're lying (or they may well do) but they will NOT tell you the truth, simply because they don't know it yet. The job of a designer is not to write down all the wishes, hopes and dreams that exit the mouth of the client, it's to present them with a list of what's possible, what's necessary and what can be done within the constraints (time, money, skills) that exist.
In the end it doesn't matter what methodologies you use. Good, talented, motivated developers will get the job done no matter what processes or obstacles you put in their way. Lazy, stupid, demotivated or confused developers will never finish the work
Anyway, the truly rich don't travel - people come to them.
I think the OP is simply projecting their own impatience.
Where I live this has been the de-facto position since forever. How could it possibly be anyone else's responsibility, or fault?
We know that any piece of personal technology that CAN support advertising WILL be used for that purpose - whether we want it to, or not. Imagine how intrusive it would be to be using the Google Glass technology to look at something and suddenly an ad. pops up trying to sell us something that looks like what we're looking at.
What's even worse will be the privacy issues. Not only will advertisers be able to track the users as they can now, with 3G, Wifi and BT triangulation, but they'll be able to infiltrate our state of mind by interpreting what or who we're looking at.