Personally, I think it would be damned cool if they found an indisputable fossil. It would force a whole lot of philosophical re-thinking, and probably give a huge-assed push towards getting humans into space
Will it force a whole lot of philosophical re-thinking if this mission, and the others that follow it, never find a fossil? Will it force people who are either convinced, or even merely hopeful, about the existence of extraterrestrial life to rethink the possibility that earth is the only lifeform-sustaining planet that has ever existed in the history of the universe? If not, in looking for and hoping for fossils, you're really only exercising confirmation bias.
Bah. For anything drug-related, you'll find hundreds of big-pharma studies saying their pills are the only thing that'll cure you, and hundreds of other studies saying their pills will do nothing but kill ya. Personally, I love big pharma...but only for recreational purposes.
I've read this argument plenty of times, and I used to think this way myself, so I want to explain once why it misses the point. You're equivocating "big pharma" palliative and analgesic products, with "big pharma" pharmacological research, development, and production for severe, debilitating, or life-threatening medical conditions.
If you've never been sick, it's an easy mistake to make. I was completely healthy for my whole life, and used to think drug companies were nothing more than pill pushers. Then I got sick -- very, very sick. As in, nearly-died sick. The only thing that spared my life, aside from expert care from my physicians, were the drugs that I was prescribed. Without the medications that I was given, I would likely be dead. I'm not talking about aspirin or amoxicillin, I'm talking about finely-tuned steroids, anti-inflammatory drugs, and last-line-of-defense antibiotics. When you're wheeled into the emergency room with pain so severe that you literally can't breathe, "rest, tea, and herbs" don't even begin to cut it.
I'm not giving all pharmaceutical companies carte blanche. There have been, and continue to be, serious ethical problems with regard to how drugs are marketed to consumers and physicians, or how some drugs are rushed through clinical trials without the necessary levels of scrutiny. If you've never needed the big iron that pharmaceutical companies and the researchers that work for them develop, count yourself blessed. Having been in a position where I did need them and my life depended on them, I have a much greater appreciation for "big pharma," on a whole.
(On a side note, I'd like to add that my medical care would have been unaffordable if not for my being privileged with good health insurance. We need universal health care coverage so that expert medical attention isn't just a matter of privilege.)
Thanks for writing it! I use boa to serve up PAC files for a squid proxy, because boa is the smallest HTTP server that supports DirectoryIndex, letting me serve PAC files as the default index, and thus allowing a simple hostname for the PAC location. Good work!
Also, they shouldn't have changed the Quicktime API behavior between minor updates for DRMs sake!
Point releases of QuickTime, and most other Apple software for that matter, are considered major updates. If you wanted to make your argument, you'd have pointed to the security content of QuickTime 7.4.5 as an example of significant architectural changes not on a point release.
BTW, I can't believe that Apple doesn't install multiple versions of Quicktime in parallel for better application compatiblity.
On Mac OS X, QuickTime is a core component of the operating system; ergo, parallel installations wouldn't be feasible.
From an end user perspective, parallel installations can be a bad practice. Many Windows computers, for example, have half a dozen iterations of Java on them.
Your problem isn't the operating system or that you're living on the bleeding edge of updates. Your problem is that you use software from two third-party developers that had bugs. Not Apple's problem.
I'd agree that the Game Boy is tough. A friend's brother was a U.S. Marine on the ground in the combat phase of Desert Storm. He took his Game Boy. When he came back from his tour of duty, the Game Boy was absolutely caked and brownish black with dirt, mud, and sand in it everywhere, yet it still worked perfectly.
Microsoft is completely missing that what its enterprise customers *really* want is a Type-1 hypervisor (akin to Hyper-V) for desktops and laptops. It would radically simplify deployments; rather than having to maintain an RIS/WDS server with different images for different hardware configurations, a company could just have one software image for all the boxes and let the hypervisor worry about the hardware.
From a device security perspective, this could be useful too, as the hypervisor could be tuned to only expose certain hardware to the operating system, allowing corporate IT departments to restrict ports, drives, and network adapters that can leak data.
If you're not familiar with Andy Kaufman characters, you might need to Google 'Tony Clifton.' Reading through the comments in some preceding entries (where a few commenters wryly accuse Dan's writing of becoming Kaufman-esque) helps too.
Having said that, the tone of my original posting was unnecessarily snide and condescending. I am sorry and apologize to you; there was no reason for me to personally attack or insult you.
Too bad this whole thing is fake and you're blowing the Orwell hysteria whistle into the wind. But yes, "MegaCorp" (or, Apple) can do whatever they want with their "essentially unlimited resources." 1000x worse, just like you said. You're one sharp tack, sir.
However, I'm not aware of any hybrids that are being sold with automatic transmissions. I assume that there are good reasons for that, so I'd be willing to at least consider giving up my beloved manual if I had to.
I think you meant "being sold without." Depending on the hybrid technology being used, there is a good reason. My wife and I own a Prius, which is a series/parallel hybrid. More basically, the electric motor is also a drive motor. Because of this, the electric motor and the IC engine are constantly handing off between each other, and the IC engine gets shut off during driving depending on whether or not it's needed.
The Prius, and most other hybrids like it, use computer-controlled continuously variable transmissions to constantly optimize for the right gearing ratios. Because a series/parallel hybrid utilizes the IC engine in a totally different way from a conventional IC engine, it's not really feasible to have a manual transmission. As the driver, you'd have to be aware of when the IC engine was starting stopping, what gears it needed to be in, etc.
In hybrids in which the electric motor isn't a drive motor (idle IC engine kill only, for instance), I wouldn't see why there would be any reason you couldn't have a manual transmission, since the IC engine is really the only thing powering the drivetrain. These types of "hybrids" aren't greatly more efficient than IC engine-only, though, so with a bigger push on fuel efficiency, I'm not quite sure how popular they'll be.
The moral of the story is that the emergence is likely to push manual transmissions into more obscurity. I agree with you that a manual is fun to drive, but the trade-off in fuel savings is worth it to me. Hybrids are fun to drive too, just in a different way.
...says the man whose grown-up website is full of video game mods for Doom 3 and Morrowind.
Most of the kids I know bring up the level of quality in a discussion. It's largely due to the fact that they call it like they see it without glossing over or BSing, and that they're much more interested in talking about interesting and fun things than boring crap like who-married-who or what's-his-name-in-parliament. Far too many adults, including people like you (judging solely from the tone of your post) are insufferably boring to talk to for any length of time.
I'd guess since you think kids "bring down the maturity of the discussion as a whole" that you've never talked to any, or at least not talked to them on their level. Are you one of those boorish people who talks down to kids because you're much "older" and "wiser" than them?
Somebody needs to grow up, but it's clearly not the kids.
Thinkpads are simply the most solid laptops money can buy. Undeniably number-one support. Also they're a lot more durable than macs.
I want to disabuse you of this view, not because I'm a Mac user (though I am) but because I work on ThinkPads all day.
My company owns a huge fleet of ThinkPad tablets, all less than six months old. In that time, we've identified a few major issues. 1) The main batteries abruptly fail to charge. Lenovo knows about this and cross-ships replacements, but isn't issuing a recall, so won't do a fleet replacement for us; we have to call on every single battery that fails. 2) The screws on the screen hinge aren't properly torqued. Some screens nearly fall off after the screws loosen; we have to open them up, threadlock, and retorque the screws in the hinge. 3) Stylus latch mechanism breaks. The latch for keeping the stylus in the laptop is attached to the chassis with a 1mm-thin piece of plastic that is subject to high amounts of stress due to the stylus being removed and put back in. The latch is broken or breaking on single X60 I've seen so far. It's a design defect, but Lenovo won't admit it. 4) Sporadic motherboard failures. No more than in any other large fleet of laptops, but no less, either.
In the same time (actually, a year longer) my MacBook has had nothing break on it. However, that's just one laptop; I'm sure that if I worked on a fleet of them, I'd see just as many problems with the ThinkPads. Why? All laptops are more prone to failure due to the nature of being a laptop. ThinkPads aren't more solid. Neither are MacBooks. Neither are countless other vendors I've worked with. Laptops break; all of them. Durability is, and never has been, a selling point for mobile computing. (Ruggedized systems obviously excepted.)
Right up front, it needs to be said that Steve Ballmer is a smart guy, and for him as CEO to come out and be anything less than wildly enthusiastic about his own company's products would be malfeasant.
What's curious to me about Ballmer's statement, though, is his apparent belief that Microsoft can indeed push their software into 60% or more of the entire mobile phone market. Does he actually think that Windows Mobile, in any of its current forms or imagined future forms, will ever make it into 60% of all mobile phones? That's ludicrous. Most of the 1.3b annual phones sold are of the vanilla dial-numbers-and-talk variety. 60% of people don't want to struggle with the Windows interface just to dial their phone.
More to the point, there's an equivocation inherent in Ballmer's thinking that will keep Windows Mobile in marketshare obscurity forever until he, and all of Microsoft with him, unlearns it. Windows Mobile and what we've seen of the iPhone are both "smartphones" only insofar as they both possess "phone, plus other stuff" featuresets. But go watch Jobs' keynote demonstration of the iPhone and try to draw meaningful comparisons between it and Windows Mobile. WM has a defined and seemingly content userbase, especially in business, but that's a totally different "smartphone" from the lifestyle device that the iPhone was demonstrated to be.
Ballmer, in saying that he'd like 60% of phones to run Microsoft's software, is saying he'd like 60% of phones to behave like enterprise corporate devices. Steve Jobs, in saying that he'd like 1% of phones to be iPhones, is saying he'd like 1% of phones to be something more useful to people than just a lump of telecom in their pocket.
The difference between those two views says a lot about who, in a two-decade-or-so predictive view, is statistically more likely to be "the mobile phone company."
As the owner of a 2006 Prius, I'm glad to hear that the EPA won't consider the "all-electric" mode of hybrids when calculating mileage. They shouldn't, because the "all-electric" mode is somewhat unpredictable. Assuming the internal combustion engine isn't cold (~60F or higher), current hybrids will probably operate in all-electric mode between 0-25 MPH, assuming slow and constant acceleration, flat terrain, etc. If these conditions aren't met, the ICE will kick in.
Note that this isn't a flaw in design; rather, this is exactly how hybrids are supposed to operate. The electric motor powers the car where the ICE is least efficient, and power assists the ICE where the ICE is efficient. Priuses never got the advertised 60 MPG city because it's virtually impossible to guarantee that you'll always be all-electric between 0-25 MPH.
The revised EPA will still show that hybrids are more fuel efficient than gas-only drivetrains. However, with more accurate MPG numbers posted on sales stickers, a more accurate comparison between hybrids and gas-only drivetrains will be possible. This will help potential buyers evaluate whether or not the added up-front cost of a hybrid is justified in long-term fuel savings.
Speaking as a devoted Mac user and advocate for the platform, this whole affair has shown the worst aspect of the Mac community and why so many people continue to write off the platform (an assembly of particular hardware and software) because of a small percentage of the user base (an assembly of people who use the hardware and software).
Ultimately, though - and I say this as a more-than-daily reader of the Daring Fireball website - John Gruber of Daring Fireball is to blame for this. He is the one that posted the initial exposé of what he perceived the financial situation of the MacHeist promotion to be, even though he admitted multiple times in the article that he didn't have any first-hand knowledge of how the thing was actually structured. John is often a fine voice for the Mac-core community, which is why I read his site, but this is one of those times (and there have been others) where his sharply-worded articles have done much more harm than good.
Ultimately, it benefits no one for developers to be running around calling each other four-letter names because of perceived injustices. Both sides - but especially the anti-MacHeist side - need to stop talking at a volume and profanity level that makes casual observers think somebody is being tortured. Perhaps both sides should just stop talking about it period.
One thing is very clear from this: while the Mac-core constitutes probably fewer than 5% of all Mac users, they continue to give a bad name to the entire assembly of very well-designed and nice-to-use software and hardware. As they've done practically since day one. Am I the only one that thinks they sound like televangelists sometimes?
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Personally, I think it would be damned cool if they found an indisputable fossil. It would force a whole lot of philosophical re-thinking, and probably give a huge-assed push towards getting humans into space
Will it force a whole lot of philosophical re-thinking if this mission, and the others that follow it, never find a fossil? Will it force people who are either convinced, or even merely hopeful, about the existence of extraterrestrial life to rethink the possibility that earth is the only lifeform-sustaining planet that has ever existed in the history of the universe? If not, in looking for and hoping for fossils, you're really only exercising confirmation bias.
Bah. For anything drug-related, you'll find hundreds of big-pharma studies saying their pills are the only thing that'll cure you, and hundreds of other studies saying their pills will do nothing but kill ya. Personally, I love big pharma...but only for recreational purposes.
I've read this argument plenty of times, and I used to think this way myself, so I want to explain once why it misses the point. You're equivocating "big pharma" palliative and analgesic products, with "big pharma" pharmacological research, development, and production for severe, debilitating, or life-threatening medical conditions.
If you've never been sick, it's an easy mistake to make. I was completely healthy for my whole life, and used to think drug companies were nothing more than pill pushers. Then I got sick -- very, very sick. As in, nearly-died sick. The only thing that spared my life, aside from expert care from my physicians, were the drugs that I was prescribed. Without the medications that I was given, I would likely be dead. I'm not talking about aspirin or amoxicillin, I'm talking about finely-tuned steroids, anti-inflammatory drugs, and last-line-of-defense antibiotics. When you're wheeled into the emergency room with pain so severe that you literally can't breathe, "rest, tea, and herbs" don't even begin to cut it.
I'm not giving all pharmaceutical companies carte blanche. There have been, and continue to be, serious ethical problems with regard to how drugs are marketed to consumers and physicians, or how some drugs are rushed through clinical trials without the necessary levels of scrutiny. If you've never needed the big iron that pharmaceutical companies and the researchers that work for them develop, count yourself blessed. Having been in a position where I did need them and my life depended on them, I have a much greater appreciation for "big pharma," on a whole.
(On a side note, I'd like to add that my medical care would have been unaffordable if not for my being privileged with good health insurance. We need universal health care coverage so that expert medical attention isn't just a matter of privilege.)
Thanks for writing it! I use boa to serve up PAC files for a squid proxy, because boa is the smallest HTTP server that supports DirectoryIndex, letting me serve PAC files as the default index, and thus allowing a simple hostname for the PAC location. Good work!
Also, they shouldn't have changed the Quicktime API behavior between minor updates for DRMs sake!
Point releases of QuickTime, and most other Apple software for that matter, are considered major updates. If you wanted to make your argument, you'd have pointed to the security content of QuickTime 7.4.5 as an example of significant architectural changes not on a point release.
BTW, I can't believe that Apple doesn't install multiple versions of Quicktime in parallel for better application compatiblity.
On Mac OS X, QuickTime is a core component of the operating system; ergo, parallel installations wouldn't be feasible.
From an end user perspective, parallel installations can be a bad practice. Many Windows computers, for example, have half a dozen iterations of Java on them.
The 7.4 Quicktime upgrade hosed Premiere Pro on two machines. I had to back out of the last security fix to get SSH to work again.
To summarize, your Premiere installation was broken by QuickTime because "Adobe products don't write the headers until it renders the movies" and your SSH was broken because you installed a hack that the developer admits had a bug that caused the issue.
Your problem isn't the operating system or that you're living on the bleeding edge of updates. Your problem is that you use software from two third-party developers that had bugs. Not Apple's problem.
I'd agree that the Game Boy is tough. A friend's brother was a U.S. Marine on the ground in the combat phase of Desert Storm. He took his Game Boy. When he came back from his tour of duty, the Game Boy was absolutely caked and brownish black with dirt, mud, and sand in it everywhere, yet it still worked perfectly.
Microsoft is completely missing that what its enterprise customers *really* want is a Type-1 hypervisor (akin to Hyper-V) for desktops and laptops. It would radically simplify deployments; rather than having to maintain an RIS/WDS server with different images for different hardware configurations, a company could just have one software image for all the boxes and let the hypervisor worry about the hardware.
From a device security perspective, this could be useful too, as the hypervisor could be tuned to only expose certain hardware to the operating system, allowing corporate IT departments to restrict ports, drives, and network adapters that can leak data.
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/breakfast-with-apple-lawyer.html
If you're not familiar with Andy Kaufman characters, you might need to Google 'Tony Clifton.' Reading through the comments in some preceding entries (where a few commenters wryly accuse Dan's writing of becoming Kaufman-esque) helps too.
Having said that, the tone of my original posting was unnecessarily snide and condescending. I am sorry and apologize to you; there was no reason for me to personally attack or insult you.
Too bad this whole thing is fake and you're blowing the Orwell hysteria whistle into the wind. But yes, "MegaCorp" (or, Apple) can do whatever they want with their "essentially unlimited resources." 1000x worse, just like you said. You're one sharp tack, sir.
However, I'm not aware of any hybrids that are being sold with automatic transmissions. I assume that there are good reasons for that, so I'd be willing to at least consider giving up my beloved manual if I had to.
I think you meant "being sold without." Depending on the hybrid technology being used, there is a good reason. My wife and I own a Prius, which is a series/parallel hybrid. More basically, the electric motor is also a drive motor. Because of this, the electric motor and the IC engine are constantly handing off between each other, and the IC engine gets shut off during driving depending on whether or not it's needed.
The Prius, and most other hybrids like it, use computer-controlled continuously variable transmissions to constantly optimize for the right gearing ratios. Because a series/parallel hybrid utilizes the IC engine in a totally different way from a conventional IC engine, it's not really feasible to have a manual transmission. As the driver, you'd have to be aware of when the IC engine was starting stopping, what gears it needed to be in, etc.
In hybrids in which the electric motor isn't a drive motor (idle IC engine kill only, for instance), I wouldn't see why there would be any reason you couldn't have a manual transmission, since the IC engine is really the only thing powering the drivetrain. These types of "hybrids" aren't greatly more efficient than IC engine-only, though, so with a bigger push on fuel efficiency, I'm not quite sure how popular they'll be.
The moral of the story is that the emergence is likely to push manual transmissions into more obscurity. I agree with you that a manual is fun to drive, but the trade-off in fuel savings is worth it to me. Hybrids are fun to drive too, just in a different way.
...says the man whose grown-up website is full of video game mods for Doom 3 and Morrowind. Most of the kids I know bring up the level of quality in a discussion. It's largely due to the fact that they call it like they see it without glossing over or BSing, and that they're much more interested in talking about interesting and fun things than boring crap like who-married-who or what's-his-name-in-parliament. Far too many adults, including people like you (judging solely from the tone of your post) are insufferably boring to talk to for any length of time. I'd guess since you think kids "bring down the maturity of the discussion as a whole" that you've never talked to any, or at least not talked to them on their level. Are you one of those boorish people who talks down to kids because you're much "older" and "wiser" than them? Somebody needs to grow up, but it's clearly not the kids.
Thinkpads are simply the most solid laptops money can buy. Undeniably number-one support. Also they're a lot more durable than macs.
I want to disabuse you of this view, not because I'm a Mac user (though I am) but because I work on ThinkPads all day.
My company owns a huge fleet of ThinkPad tablets, all less than six months old. In that time, we've identified a few major issues. 1) The main batteries abruptly fail to charge. Lenovo knows about this and cross-ships replacements, but isn't issuing a recall, so won't do a fleet replacement for us; we have to call on every single battery that fails. 2) The screws on the screen hinge aren't properly torqued. Some screens nearly fall off after the screws loosen; we have to open them up, threadlock, and retorque the screws in the hinge. 3) Stylus latch mechanism breaks. The latch for keeping the stylus in the laptop is attached to the chassis with a 1mm-thin piece of plastic that is subject to high amounts of stress due to the stylus being removed and put back in. The latch is broken or breaking on single X60 I've seen so far. It's a design defect, but Lenovo won't admit it. 4) Sporadic motherboard failures. No more than in any other large fleet of laptops, but no less, either.
In the same time (actually, a year longer) my MacBook has had nothing break on it. However, that's just one laptop; I'm sure that if I worked on a fleet of them, I'd see just as many problems with the ThinkPads. Why? All laptops are more prone to failure due to the nature of being a laptop. ThinkPads aren't more solid. Neither are MacBooks. Neither are countless other vendors I've worked with. Laptops break; all of them. Durability is, and never has been, a selling point for mobile computing. (Ruggedized systems obviously excepted.)
Right up front, it needs to be said that Steve Ballmer is a smart guy, and for him as CEO to come out and be anything less than wildly enthusiastic about his own company's products would be malfeasant.
What's curious to me about Ballmer's statement, though, is his apparent belief that Microsoft can indeed push their software into 60% or more of the entire mobile phone market. Does he actually think that Windows Mobile, in any of its current forms or imagined future forms, will ever make it into 60% of all mobile phones? That's ludicrous. Most of the 1.3b annual phones sold are of the vanilla dial-numbers-and-talk variety. 60% of people don't want to struggle with the Windows interface just to dial their phone.
More to the point, there's an equivocation inherent in Ballmer's thinking that will keep Windows Mobile in marketshare obscurity forever until he, and all of Microsoft with him, unlearns it. Windows Mobile and what we've seen of the iPhone are both "smartphones" only insofar as they both possess "phone, plus other stuff" featuresets. But go watch Jobs' keynote demonstration of the iPhone and try to draw meaningful comparisons between it and Windows Mobile. WM has a defined and seemingly content userbase, especially in business, but that's a totally different "smartphone" from the lifestyle device that the iPhone was demonstrated to be.
Ballmer, in saying that he'd like 60% of phones to run Microsoft's software, is saying he'd like 60% of phones to behave like enterprise corporate devices. Steve Jobs, in saying that he'd like 1% of phones to be iPhones, is saying he'd like 1% of phones to be something more useful to people than just a lump of telecom in their pocket.
The difference between those two views says a lot about who, in a two-decade-or-so predictive view, is statistically more likely to be "the mobile phone company."
As the owner of a 2006 Prius, I'm glad to hear that the EPA won't consider the "all-electric" mode of hybrids when calculating mileage. They shouldn't, because the "all-electric" mode is somewhat unpredictable. Assuming the internal combustion engine isn't cold (~60F or higher), current hybrids will probably operate in all-electric mode between 0-25 MPH, assuming slow and constant acceleration, flat terrain, etc. If these conditions aren't met, the ICE will kick in.
Note that this isn't a flaw in design; rather, this is exactly how hybrids are supposed to operate. The electric motor powers the car where the ICE is least efficient, and power assists the ICE where the ICE is efficient. Priuses never got the advertised 60 MPG city because it's virtually impossible to guarantee that you'll always be all-electric between 0-25 MPH.
The revised EPA will still show that hybrids are more fuel efficient than gas-only drivetrains. However, with more accurate MPG numbers posted on sales stickers, a more accurate comparison between hybrids and gas-only drivetrains will be possible. This will help potential buyers evaluate whether or not the added up-front cost of a hybrid is justified in long-term fuel savings.
Speaking as a devoted Mac user and advocate for the platform, this whole affair has shown the worst aspect of the Mac community and why so many people continue to write off the platform (an assembly of particular hardware and software) because of a small percentage of the user base (an assembly of people who use the hardware and software).
Ultimately, though - and I say this as a more-than-daily reader of the Daring Fireball website - John Gruber of Daring Fireball is to blame for this. He is the one that posted the initial exposé of what he perceived the financial situation of the MacHeist promotion to be, even though he admitted multiple times in the article that he didn't have any first-hand knowledge of how the thing was actually structured. John is often a fine voice for the Mac-core community, which is why I read his site, but this is one of those times (and there have been others) where his sharply-worded articles have done much more harm than good.
Ultimately, it benefits no one for developers to be running around calling each other four-letter names because of perceived injustices. Both sides - but especially the anti-MacHeist side - need to stop talking at a volume and profanity level that makes casual observers think somebody is being tortured. Perhaps both sides should just stop talking about it period.
One thing is very clear from this: while the Mac-core constitutes probably fewer than 5% of all Mac users, they continue to give a bad name to the entire assembly of very well-designed and nice-to-use software and hardware. As they've done practically since day one. Am I the only one that thinks they sound like televangelists sometimes?