Actually, the phrase "eye for an eye" carried an original meaning of a call for just punishment which suited the crime rather than excessive or retributive punishment. That is, it was meant "only an eye for an eye" instead of "a life for an eye". This "Chicago way" of escalating responses leads to conflict, and that's not the goal of criminal justice.
In our modern times, "one death for one death" is generally excessive, especially if it's "death of an innocent for death of a 'spy'".
The fact that this thread starts with the comment "They could preach slavery, rape, murder, hating on gays/women/divorcees. Oh wait, that would probably let them justify having a state on top of a religion ^^" and nobody has stood up to denounce that hatred itself is indicative of the issue.
No, it is indicative that people know what is written in the Christian Bible (and other religious books based on those ancient scriptures). Do we need to repeat ourselves and explicitly point the references for those atrocious acts in that book?
First of all, I don't think anybody who would state what I quoted above is a person believes the Bible to be the Word of God, so I rather question the practice of quoting and interpreting what you believe to be false. It is on it's face a disingenuous argument. "This isn't true except when I say it isn't" doesn't work for the religious, so it shouldn't work for the non-religious either.
Second of all, let's assume for argument's sake that a church is best positioned to interpret the Bible. This isn't much of a stretch to accept. If you want to understand Mathematics, you talk to a mathematician who has studied the field his entire life. If you want the best understanding of religion, you should talk to someone who has studied that field their entire lives: a priest.
So Christians can't decide as a whole to do much of anything, it seems, regardless of what the Bible says. Yet when a non-religious person quotes Leviticus 18:22 it somehow means that all Christians are homophobic assholes.
You want to know how to be a Christian? Read the Bible. Think about what it means to you. Decide for yourself what it's supposed to mean and what's really important. Believe what you want. Find the truth in there for yourself, and use it to improve your life and improve your community. Everything else is just ceremony and pageantry. Find someone who disagrees with you? Let them. You are no more an authority than they are. God is the authority. Let Him decide.
I think his point is that the SlashDot community tends to conflate "Christian" with "fundamentalist" and "evangelical," which, while a number of very vocal Christians are are not the entirety of the Christian community. The fact that this thread starts with the comment "They could preach slavery, rape, murder, hating on gays/women/divorcees. Oh wait, that would probably let them justify having a state on top of a religion ^^" and nobody has stood up to denounce that hatred itself is indicative of the issue. Topics about religion on SlashDot invariably involve these kinds of generalizations about "Christians" or religious types in general and nobody seems to have a problem with it.
The truth is that religion itself has nothing to do with slavery, rape, murder, or hatred of certain groups. Dogmatic thinking (religious or otherwise), willful ignorance, sectarianism, and xenophobia do. The very act of denigrating "Christians" -- whether with direct attacks like this or with callous mocking like FSM and invisible unicorns -- and lumping them together in this fashion as rapists, murderers, slavers, etc. perpetuates the exact same behavior here that resulted in these atrocities.
Religion isn't what's wrong. Religion is not evil. Hate is evil. Perpetuating misunderstanding and resentment is evil. Humans are evil, not organizations.
IT approaches a system in terms of maintenance, engineering in terms of design. This is pretty obvious, as IT is focused on getting a system up and running for a long time, while engineering (and web design and software design) is focused on producing something or completing a project.
Do you really think the engineers that keep the transmission running in a TV network don't care about maintenance?
I was working with project engineers, not operations engineers. That's rather the distinction I was making: designers vs operators.
Interesting, as while my experience matches yours that IT and engineering always butt heads, the particulars are a little different. The basic issue seems to stem from the people approaching the SDLC from opposite ends. IT approaches a system in terms of maintenance, engineering in terms of design. This is pretty obvious, as IT is focused on getting a system up and running for a long time, while engineering (and web design and software design) is focused on producing something or completing a project.
On the IT systems problems tend to be addressed in the most bureaucratic way possible, which means lots of round holes for mostly round pegs. There are standards in place which cover 95% of the systems and 95% of the software. Then there's the 5% that don't conform and are exceptions, which invariably result in either software not working correctly or systems causing lots of problems. Initial costs tend to be high, but long term costs are much lower. When it does things right the problems disappear into the background and a silently fixed forever. When it does things wrong the problems never go away and are often no longer even acknowledged as problems. Industrial standards, best practices, and such are emphasized, sometimes even over the effectiveness of solution.
As an IT person, the most frustrating thing you hear from engineers is "why?". Particularly because when that question is answered the engineer won't listen anyways and will proceed to still do it wrong. You will tend to feel ignored as a resource and generally regarded as someone who sits on their butt and does nothing all day. You will not appreciate how difficult it is to create something completely new that works within very short time frames and under constant pressure.
On the engineer side, problems tend to be addressed in the most cost-effective and practical manner, but also the most short-sighted. Each problem will get a custom fix which requires very little effort to set up and typically corrects exactly the problem required in very elegant ways. However, it can be a fix that is completely undocumented, works for just that one issue, and requires a significant amount of maintenance or babysitting to ensure is working. Engineers tend to treat all computers like PLCs, meaning no maintenance should be necessary after initial configuration. Disaster recovery, redundancy, and backup are completely neglected as the engineer assumes "it will just be replaced"... without always thinking what that means exactly.
As an engineer, the most frustrating thing you hear from IT is "no, because...". Particularly because you wouldn't be talking to them at all unless you needed the answer to be "yes". You will tend to feel patronized by people who don't know what you do and steamrolled by policymakers who make decisions that prevent you from doing your job, or worse, "fix" problems by taking away your tools. You will not appreciate how difficult it is to take dozens of systems designed by different people with different goals and make them all work together for several years at a stretch.
Actually, unary works great with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Seriously. It helps legibility if you use the comma every five places, which matches the common form of unary math, the tally mark system.
1,11111 / 111 = 1001, but there are no zeroes, so = 11 [ 6 / 3 = 2 ]
That all this works doesn't so much reflect anything magical about the unary system as it reflects the integrity of the place value system and how that system is essential to the way we learn to calculate long multiplication and long division. The only problem with it is that it doesn't do decimals. 0.1 unary = 1 * 1^(-1) = 1. This means you're stuck using fractions.
Of course, if they pull another Scouring of the Shire / Tom Bombadil fiasco messing the book up, I'm going to be upset.
Then I would prepare to be upset.
Many things work very well in books and very poorly in movies, and subplots unrelated to the main plot are one of them. The encounter with Tom Bombadil, the scouring of the Shire, and the encounter with the barrow-wights were all correctly left out of the movie adaptation. While you and I may wish to see these tales portrayed on screen, doing so would detract from the pacing of a movie. Pacing and tempo are much more delicate in a movie compared to a novel. I would much rather see a great movie whose story was imperfectly adapted than a perfect translation which would doubtless be all but unwatchable. I argue that the Hobbit will similarly either significantly diverge from the novel or be a supremely awful movie.
You know the bathysphere sequence at the start of BioShock? Rapture is the kind of place that Ayn Rand would build. The philosophy is called Objectivism. It is by contemporary standards, I think, rather naive. It's capitalism and social Darwinism taken to an extreme end of the American perspective.
I'm not trolling here, but I honestly never understood this. Could someone explain to a non-sports person why steroids (which is what I assume you are talking about) is any different from taking vitamin supplements, diets planned by professional nutritionists, sports drink, specially designed running shoes, etc. Who cares? If it's not "fair" just allow everyone to take steroids.
Sports are intended to be a combined display of inborn talent, natural ability, training, exercise, and experience. Ultimately that is what creates the competition.
Vitamins, dietary supplements, and the like are valid because micronutrients are necessary to the functioning of the human body. That is, you can't ban them because they're necessary for life. The same is true for food. Drugs, on the other hand, serve no nutritional purpose. That's why they're called drugs and not foods. You can't justify that your body needs them, so they don't represent a natural state you could reach through (again) inborn talent, natural ability, training, exercise, and experience.
As far as equipment, the primary motivation for most sporting equipment -- excepting equipment required such as skis in downhill skiing or a stick in hockey -- is not performance, but safety. Metal spikes work much better on baseball shoes, but are banned because of safety reasons. Bare knuckles do much more damage in boxing, but you risk breaking or injuring your hand. In most sports you can find similar examples where regulations proscribe or restrict what can be used even though other equipment would perform much better. It's not uncommon for sporting equipment to cause controversy because of a perceived performance advantage (see clack skates, the Michael Phelps swimsuit, aluminum vs wooden bats, etc).
What does an article about memory usage comparisons between FF and Google Chrome have to do with performance metrics of just Firefox running on Windows, Linux, and WINE under Linux?
There's an extension Adblock which is similar to AdBlock Plus. It isn't identical, but other than issues with video-embedded ads (which I remember having with Adblock Plus occasionally) it works just as well as far as I'm concerned.
As other posters have mentioned Chromium. Here are the major differences. "User metrics" and "crash reporting" are the only two differences with potential privacy issues, AFAIK.
Yeah, but it's a trade off. What if gas prices had fallen? American car companies would have been poised to dominate the market. Or what if, instead of flooding in Thailand, new local resources resulted in 50% lower costs there? You'd have to close your other branches as they would no longer be economical. What if that kind of thing already happened? Maybe there's a reason that geographic location is used for manufacture of hard drives (presence of rare earth elements like neodymium?).
It's all well and good in hindsight to say that putting all your eggs in one basket is wrong, but if building your factory within one river valley reduces costs significantly then one would argue that building anywhere else would be similarly irresponsible.
Yeah, I tend to agree. He bought an iPad 2 with 3G, a minimum of $630 for the 16GB version. Add to that the keyboard which is priced at $100. So he's already out $730. I wonder why it was able to replace his laptop?
This is less a story of "wow the iPad 2 is great" and more about "wow, I never needed that horsepower or screen real estate in my old laptop and I can actually use a 10 hour battery life." He talks about content creation, but he's referring just to a blog. Text entry on a web site or text editor. Cripes, he could do that with a $200 computer. He says:
Without the ZaggFolio, I used the iPad mostly for reading and light productivity. I’d happily type brief e-mails on it, but never anything as long as a meaty blog post or article. But Zagg’s no-compromise keyboard made typing every bit as comfy as it is on a notebook. All of a sudden I could write hundreds of words on the iPad. Or thousands of them.
So, yes, it does the exact same thing your laptop did for you. Let you type words into a digital document.
He likes the 3G service so much he's paying for it, but laptops with built-in 3G have been available outside the US for years. They're quite rare in the US because our wireless carriers don't let you buy sim cards and connect any device you'd like to their networks. This is not the case in Europe and Japan.
He actually argues that he likes the single-task environment because other programs don't distract him:
I quickly discovered yet another simple joy of using the iPad as a blogging/writing tool: Its utter predictability and simplicity.
When you use a Windows PC–and, to a somewhat lesser extent, a Mac–you get dragged down by the responsibilities and obligations of using a computer. Even if you’re very familiar with a program, you need to bob and weave your way around icons and menu items you don’t require at the moment to get to the ones you do need. Programs other than the one you’re using may vie for your attention, possibly alerting you, for instance, that they need to be updated. You might have to rummage around in folders to find documents. When you multitask between apps, you need to juggle their windows, maximizing or minimizing them as you go. If a program stalls, you’ll likely need to kill it manually.
With the iPad, all that goes away. You can devote nearly every second of your time to the task at hand, rather than babysitting a balky computer. I don’t feel like I’m “using an iPad to write.” I’m just writing. It’s a far more tranquil, focused experience than using a PC or Mac. It’s also easier to dive in, do a bit of work as time allows, then dive out–especially since the iPad’s instant-on feature is more reliably instant than the alleged instant-on capabilities of traditional computers.
I think he's going to be hopelessly disappointed when they add improved multitasking in future versions of iOS. He's literally complaining that his laptop is running too many programs at once. Honestly, this sounds more like a "Oh my God it's software that's not bloated and only has features I use!" rather than "This changes the way I do everything." He even states later:
When I’m at home, however, I’m less concerned with power management and portability. Oftentimes, I use my MacBook Air instead of the iPad. But not always–really, unless I have a specific need for a Mac app, I generally grab whatever’s handiest, and don’t give it much thought.
That pretty much says to me "I usually don't need the power of a laptop for my computing needs". It sounds to me like he has a device which: 1) Does what he needs it to do (document creation); 2) Doesn't try to do anything else; 3) Offers the perception of performance (fast boot, etc.) while his workload isn't limited by the lack of performance; 4) Has 3G and long battery life; 5) Has a keyboard.
In my experience this type of "planning failure" is caused when IT repeatedly tells management they need money to maintain and upgrade systems, and management consistently says no because they don't have the money for it. Not enough money or people to configure, install, support, and maintain any new systems because the budget won't allow any more. Yet somehow there always seems to be money for shiny new iPads and iPhones for the executives.
Personally, I found the headline combined fact that they published the paper in something called PNAS to be so over the top that I questioned if it was something the Onion produced.
In 3.x, a 10th level Fighter realistically has the choice of the following: 1) Move & attack 2) Attack & move 3) Full attack 4) Double move
In 4E, a 10th level Fighter has the choice of: 1) 2 at-will powers 2) Racial power 3) 3 encounter powers 4) 3 daily powers 5) 3 utility powers 6) Class powers (depending on build) 7) Movement (where to move to best utilize your class power)
And the 4E character has to make the same decision each round. The simplest character in 4E (which, granted, the Fighter is not due to the importance of movement and position) has more choices than your average Druid or Cleric in 3.x (that edition's champions of possessing a large number of possible actions). Of the 7 members of my D&D group, only about 3 of us ever got to the stage of mastery this system requires in order to play at an acceptable pace. Most other people consistently forgot they had anything other than at-will powers. One poor player who I witnessed at a D&D Encounters session never used anything other than a Melee Basic Attack. The game is simply too complicated and requires too much thinking for most people. It's just not fun for them, and why play a game if it isn't fun?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the phrase "eye for an eye" carried an original meaning of a call for just punishment which suited the crime rather than excessive or retributive punishment. That is, it was meant "only an eye for an eye" instead of "a life for an eye". This "Chicago way" of escalating responses leads to conflict, and that's not the goal of criminal justice.
In our modern times, "one death for one death" is generally excessive, especially if it's "death of an innocent for death of a 'spy'".
My question is, at what point does a particular design go from being something proprietary to something obvious for it's function?
The point at which your lawyers can't convince a judge any longer, of course.
The fact that this thread starts with the comment "They could preach slavery, rape, murder, hating on gays/women/divorcees. Oh wait, that would probably let them justify having a state on top of a religion ^^" and nobody has stood up to denounce that hatred itself is indicative of the issue.
No, it is indicative that people know what is written in the Christian Bible (and other religious books based on those ancient scriptures). Do we need to repeat ourselves and explicitly point the references for those atrocious acts in that book?
First of all, I don't think anybody who would state what I quoted above is a person believes the Bible to be the Word of God, so I rather question the practice of quoting and interpreting what you believe to be false. It is on it's face a disingenuous argument. "This isn't true except when I say it isn't" doesn't work for the religious, so it shouldn't work for the non-religious either.
Second of all, let's assume for argument's sake that a church is best positioned to interpret the Bible. This isn't much of a stretch to accept. If you want to understand Mathematics, you talk to a mathematician who has studied the field his entire life. If you want the best understanding of religion, you should talk to someone who has studied that field their entire lives: a priest.
Now, let's consider some pretty divisive topics.
Sexual orientation: no consensus.
Homosexual marriage: no consensus.
Abortion: no consensus.
God as Trinity: no consensus.
So Christians can't decide as a whole to do much of anything, it seems, regardless of what the Bible says. Yet when a non-religious person quotes Leviticus 18:22 it somehow means that all Christians are homophobic assholes.
You want to know how to be a Christian? Read the Bible. Think about what it means to you. Decide for yourself what it's supposed to mean and what's really important. Believe what you want. Find the truth in there for yourself, and use it to improve your life and improve your community. Everything else is just ceremony and pageantry. Find someone who disagrees with you? Let them. You are no more an authority than they are. God is the authority. Let Him decide.
I think his point is that the SlashDot community tends to conflate "Christian" with "fundamentalist" and "evangelical," which, while a number of very vocal Christians are are not the entirety of the Christian community. The fact that this thread starts with the comment "They could preach slavery, rape, murder, hating on gays/women/divorcees. Oh wait, that would probably let them justify having a state on top of a religion ^^" and nobody has stood up to denounce that hatred itself is indicative of the issue. Topics about religion on SlashDot invariably involve these kinds of generalizations about "Christians" or religious types in general and nobody seems to have a problem with it.
The truth is that religion itself has nothing to do with slavery, rape, murder, or hatred of certain groups. Dogmatic thinking (religious or otherwise), willful ignorance, sectarianism, and xenophobia do. The very act of denigrating "Christians" -- whether with direct attacks like this or with callous mocking like FSM and invisible unicorns -- and lumping them together in this fashion as rapists, murderers, slavers, etc. perpetuates the exact same behavior here that resulted in these atrocities.
Religion isn't what's wrong. Religion is not evil. Hate is evil. Perpetuating misunderstanding and resentment is evil. Humans are evil, not organizations.
and it's not like china is opposed to clean energy, they're just cheap and corrupt
**sniff** These emerging economies grow up so fast! **wipes tear**
Do you really think the engineers that keep the transmission running in a TV network don't care about maintenance?
I was working with project engineers, not operations engineers. That's rather the distinction I was making: designers vs operators.
Interesting, as while my experience matches yours that IT and engineering always butt heads, the particulars are a little different. The basic issue seems to stem from the people approaching the SDLC from opposite ends. IT approaches a system in terms of maintenance, engineering in terms of design. This is pretty obvious, as IT is focused on getting a system up and running for a long time, while engineering (and web design and software design) is focused on producing something or completing a project.
On the IT systems problems tend to be addressed in the most bureaucratic way possible, which means lots of round holes for mostly round pegs. There are standards in place which cover 95% of the systems and 95% of the software. Then there's the 5% that don't conform and are exceptions, which invariably result in either software not working correctly or systems causing lots of problems. Initial costs tend to be high, but long term costs are much lower. When it does things right the problems disappear into the background and a silently fixed forever. When it does things wrong the problems never go away and are often no longer even acknowledged as problems. Industrial standards, best practices, and such are emphasized, sometimes even over the effectiveness of solution.
As an IT person, the most frustrating thing you hear from engineers is "why?". Particularly because when that question is answered the engineer won't listen anyways and will proceed to still do it wrong. You will tend to feel ignored as a resource and generally regarded as someone who sits on their butt and does nothing all day. You will not appreciate how difficult it is to create something completely new that works within very short time frames and under constant pressure.
On the engineer side, problems tend to be addressed in the most cost-effective and practical manner, but also the most short-sighted. Each problem will get a custom fix which requires very little effort to set up and typically corrects exactly the problem required in very elegant ways. However, it can be a fix that is completely undocumented, works for just that one issue, and requires a significant amount of maintenance or babysitting to ensure is working. Engineers tend to treat all computers like PLCs, meaning no maintenance should be necessary after initial configuration. Disaster recovery, redundancy, and backup are completely neglected as the engineer assumes "it will just be replaced"... without always thinking what that means exactly.
As an engineer, the most frustrating thing you hear from IT is "no, because...". Particularly because you wouldn't be talking to them at all unless you needed the answer to be "yes". You will tend to feel patronized by people who don't know what you do and steamrolled by policymakers who make decisions that prevent you from doing your job, or worse, "fix" problems by taking away your tools. You will not appreciate how difficult it is to take dozens of systems designed by different people with different goals and make them all work together for several years at a stretch.
Actually, unary works great with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Seriously. It helps legibility if you use the comma every five places, which matches the common form of unary math, the tally mark system.
1111 * 11 = 1111 * 1 + 1111 * 1 = 1111+1111 = 111,11111 [ 4 * 2 = 8 ]
11111 * 111 = 11111+11111+11111 = 11111,11111,11111 [ 5 * 3 = 15 ]
1,11111 / 111 = 1001, but there are no zeroes, so = 11 [ 6 / 3 = 2 ]
That all this works doesn't so much reflect anything magical about the unary system as it reflects the integrity of the place value system and how that system is essential to the way we learn to calculate long multiplication and long division. The only problem with it is that it doesn't do decimals. 0.1 unary = 1 * 1^(-1) = 1. This means you're stuck using fractions.
Of course, if they pull another Scouring of the Shire / Tom Bombadil fiasco messing the book up, I'm going to be upset.
Then I would prepare to be upset.
Many things work very well in books and very poorly in movies, and subplots unrelated to the main plot are one of them. The encounter with Tom Bombadil, the scouring of the Shire, and the encounter with the barrow-wights were all correctly left out of the movie adaptation. While you and I may wish to see these tales portrayed on screen, doing so would detract from the pacing of a movie. Pacing and tempo are much more delicate in a movie compared to a novel. I would much rather see a great movie whose story was imperfectly adapted than a perfect translation which would doubtless be all but unwatchable. I argue that the Hobbit will similarly either significantly diverge from the novel or be a supremely awful movie.
You know the bathysphere sequence at the start of BioShock? Rapture is the kind of place that Ayn Rand would build. The philosophy is called Objectivism. It is by contemporary standards, I think, rather naive. It's capitalism and social Darwinism taken to an extreme end of the American perspective.
Seriously? A cell phone. The wristwatch is one of the first things they subsumed, and long before the appearance of smartphones.
I'm not trolling here, but I honestly never understood this. Could someone explain to a non-sports person why steroids (which is what I assume you are talking about) is any different from taking vitamin supplements, diets planned by professional nutritionists, sports drink, specially designed running shoes, etc. Who cares? If it's not "fair" just allow everyone to take steroids.
Sports are intended to be a combined display of inborn talent, natural ability, training, exercise, and experience. Ultimately that is what creates the competition.
Vitamins, dietary supplements, and the like are valid because micronutrients are necessary to the functioning of the human body. That is, you can't ban them because they're necessary for life. The same is true for food. Drugs, on the other hand, serve no nutritional purpose. That's why they're called drugs and not foods. You can't justify that your body needs them, so they don't represent a natural state you could reach through (again) inborn talent, natural ability, training, exercise, and experience.
As far as equipment, the primary motivation for most sporting equipment -- excepting equipment required such as skis in downhill skiing or a stick in hockey -- is not performance, but safety. Metal spikes work much better on baseball shoes, but are banned because of safety reasons. Bare knuckles do much more damage in boxing, but you risk breaking or injuring your hand. In most sports you can find similar examples where regulations proscribe or restrict what can be used even though other equipment would perform much better. It's not uncommon for sporting equipment to cause controversy because of a perceived performance advantage (see clack skates, the Michael Phelps swimsuit, aluminum vs wooden bats, etc).
What does an article about memory usage comparisons between FF and Google Chrome have to do with performance metrics of just Firefox running on Windows, Linux, and WINE under Linux?
Last I knew it was performance. VC++ offers better performance than gcc. I haven't seen anything on the issue recently, but AFAIK it hasn't changed.
http://tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-javascript-linux-and-windows-and-its-not-pretty
http://tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wine-beats-linux-firefox
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/22/1854258/firefox-35rc2-performance-in-windows-vs-linux
Ghostery looks to be available on all major browsers including Chrome.
There's an extension Adblock which is similar to AdBlock Plus. It isn't identical, but other than issues with video-embedded ads (which I remember having with Adblock Plus occasionally) it works just as well as far as I'm concerned.
As other posters have mentioned Chromium. Here are the major differences. "User metrics" and "crash reporting" are the only two differences with potential privacy issues, AFAIK.
It's called a run.
Yeah, but it's a trade off. What if gas prices had fallen? American car companies would have been poised to dominate the market. Or what if, instead of flooding in Thailand, new local resources resulted in 50% lower costs there? You'd have to close your other branches as they would no longer be economical. What if that kind of thing already happened? Maybe there's a reason that geographic location is used for manufacture of hard drives (presence of rare earth elements like neodymium?).
It's all well and good in hindsight to say that putting all your eggs in one basket is wrong, but if building your factory within one river valley reduces costs significantly then one would argue that building anywhere else would be similarly irresponsible.
Yeah, I tend to agree. He bought an iPad 2 with 3G, a minimum of $630 for the 16GB version. Add to that the keyboard which is priced at $100. So he's already out $730. I wonder why it was able to replace his laptop?
This is less a story of "wow the iPad 2 is great" and more about "wow, I never needed that horsepower or screen real estate in my old laptop and I can actually use a 10 hour battery life." He talks about content creation, but he's referring just to a blog. Text entry on a web site or text editor. Cripes, he could do that with a $200 computer. He says:
Without the ZaggFolio, I used the iPad mostly for reading and light productivity. I’d happily type brief e-mails on it, but never anything as long as a meaty blog post or article. But Zagg’s no-compromise keyboard made typing every bit as comfy as it is on a notebook. All of a sudden I could write hundreds of words on the iPad. Or thousands of them.
So, yes, it does the exact same thing your laptop did for you. Let you type words into a digital document.
He likes the 3G service so much he's paying for it, but laptops with built-in 3G have been available outside the US for years. They're quite rare in the US because our wireless carriers don't let you buy sim cards and connect any device you'd like to their networks. This is not the case in Europe and Japan.
He actually argues that he likes the single-task environment because other programs don't distract him:
I quickly discovered yet another simple joy of using the iPad as a blogging/writing tool: Its utter predictability and simplicity.
When you use a Windows PC–and, to a somewhat lesser extent, a Mac–you get dragged down by the responsibilities and obligations of using a computer. Even if you’re very familiar with a program, you need to bob and weave your way around icons and menu items you don’t require at the moment to get to the ones you do need. Programs other than the one you’re using may vie for your attention, possibly alerting you, for instance, that they need to be updated. You might have to rummage around in folders to find documents. When you multitask between apps, you need to juggle their windows, maximizing or minimizing them as you go. If a program stalls, you’ll likely need to kill it manually.
With the iPad, all that goes away. You can devote nearly every second of your time to the task at hand, rather than babysitting a balky computer. I don’t feel like I’m “using an iPad to write.” I’m just writing. It’s a far more tranquil, focused experience than using a PC or Mac. It’s also easier to dive in, do a bit of work as time allows, then dive out–especially since the iPad’s instant-on feature is more reliably instant than the alleged instant-on capabilities of traditional computers.
I think he's going to be hopelessly disappointed when they add improved multitasking in future versions of iOS. He's literally complaining that his laptop is running too many programs at once. Honestly, this sounds more like a "Oh my God it's software that's not bloated and only has features I use!" rather than "This changes the way I do everything." He even states later:
When I’m at home, however, I’m less concerned with power management and portability. Oftentimes, I use my MacBook Air instead of the iPad. But not always–really, unless I have a specific need for a Mac app, I generally grab whatever’s handiest, and don’t give it much thought.
That pretty much says to me "I usually don't need the power of a laptop for my computing needs". It sounds to me like he has a device which:
1) Does what he needs it to do (document creation);
2) Doesn't try to do anything else;
3) Offers the perception of performance (fast boot, etc.) while his workload isn't limited by the lack of performance;
4) Has 3G and long battery life;
5) Has a keyboard.
In my experience this type of "planning failure" is caused when IT repeatedly tells management they need money to maintain and upgrade systems, and management consistently says no because they don't have the money for it. Not enough money or people to configure, install, support, and maintain any new systems because the budget won't allow any more. Yet somehow there always seems to be money for shiny new iPads and iPhones for the executives.
Stop typing on an iPad touch screen and use something with a keyboard!
Personally, I found the headline combined fact that they published the paper in something called PNAS to be so over the top that I questioned if it was something the Onion produced.
That's just it.
In 3.x, a 10th level Fighter realistically has the choice of the following:
1) Move & attack
2) Attack & move
3) Full attack
4) Double move
In 4E, a 10th level Fighter has the choice of:
1) 2 at-will powers
2) Racial power
3) 3 encounter powers
4) 3 daily powers
5) 3 utility powers
6) Class powers (depending on build)
7) Movement (where to move to best utilize your class power)
And the 4E character has to make the same decision each round. The simplest character in 4E (which, granted, the Fighter is not due to the importance of movement and position) has more choices than your average Druid or Cleric in 3.x (that edition's champions of possessing a large number of possible actions). Of the 7 members of my D&D group, only about 3 of us ever got to the stage of mastery this system requires in order to play at an acceptable pace. Most other people consistently forgot they had anything other than at-will powers. One poor player who I witnessed at a D&D Encounters session never used anything other than a Melee Basic Attack. The game is simply too complicated and requires too much thinking for most people. It's just not fun for them, and why play a game if it isn't fun?
Unless you're independently wealthy, good luck buying anything over $10,000.
"Wrong" is an adverb. Coincidentally, M-W uses the word "incorrectly" as a synonym.
If you're using Windows, why not use Windows Deployment Services and the MS Deployment Toolkit?