I guess you've never tried to buy and install Mac OS X on your own (yet perfectly compatible) hardware, or wanted to try peeking into the memory of certain processes.
"How could you be sent to jail for copying, if you couldn't copy it?"
Really? you can't understand how a performance might be copied without some kind of equipment to do it for you?
"Yeah, before when girls were married to whoever their parents chose was extremely liberal."
What has that got to do with sexuality? That's entirely irrelevant to anything I said.
"And homosexuality? Tell me again why Oscar Wilde was imprisoned? Or are you talking about before, when the inquisition merely burned them?"
Try looking further back, or to different regions. In fact, homosexuality was deeply rooted in Roman culture for example.
"Are you kidding me? Do you know what the average life expectancy was, back then? Or the child mortality rates? Life expectancy in the US has risen more than 25 years during the 20th Century!"
You don't really seem to understand the relevance of medicine here. People now are certainly not healthier- we have a greatly higher proportion of people with obesity, asthma and so forth. All that has changed is that we've gotten better at keeping the unhealthy alive, that doesn't mean that people are more healthy though. Better medicine increasing survivability does not imply that people are more healthy, it just means it's easier to survive when unhealthy.
I'm not sure why you seem to have taken so much offence to my post, I was merely pointing out that not everything is better, it clearly isn't, particularly in an era where the effects of overpopulation are becoming quite clear in many different ways from severe deforestation, over-fishing, pollution of vital water sources and so on. I would still rather live in the modern world personally, but that doesn't mean I'm unable to recognise that not everything is better.
Most AI researchers do not have such grand goals. Everything from spellcheckers to hand writing recognition, to Google's search algorithms are the result of AI.
Certainly not everyone is trying or even wants to produce strong AI, the goal behind AI in general is simply to produce less dumb systems.
AI is a very misunderstood subject, and articles like this really don't help. Asking the question when AI will surpass human intelligence sounds like it's coming from someone who just hasn't learnt a thing about AI and it's history. AI is seen by many as a failure precisely because a fringe few keep pursuing this idea that we're just 5 to 10 years away from robots which we can't tell apart from humans when that's really an absurd goal when we're so far away from having computers capable of that level of processing, assuming we even know what computer architecture is required for such a level of intelligence. These predictions hurt the field so much and give it such a bad reputation as they consistently end up being false and yet, if it weren't for AI from real researchers who have more reasonable goals right now, we wouldn't have any of the search and data mining algorithms we have today, we wouldn't have handwriting recognition, voice recognition, we wouldn't have half as efficient networking protocols and so on.
The fruits of AI research are everywhere, it's silly to suggest AI only has such a narrow focus on a target that, with current knowledge, is so far from being possible we can't even begin to predict when it'll be possible. We may have a breakthrough tommorrow that allows it to happen within 6 months, or we may have no breakthrough at all and have to wait 50 years for high end, flexible quantum computers or biological computers to be capable of it and for us to have to figured out the required algorithms to run on them. This is why the question in the title is a really stupid one to ask- because simply put, no one can possibly even give a reasonable estimate, they can at best make a guess which may or may not end up being right.
So for many AI researchers that actually produce meaningful research, the goal is still better data mining algorithms, better algorithms for solving or finding acceptable approximations for COPs and so forth. Even when we do finally have the hardware and knowledge to produce intelligent systems your assertion that it'll be about improving itself in all dimensions will likely prove false, we might want a system that can tell us the solution to a moral dilemma, but if that moral dilemma is about someone blackmailing us, we likely wont want the system to be able to figure out how to walk and fire a gun, and then go and shoot the person doing the blackmailing, there will still be restrictions on how far you want it to go.
I do agree that your suggestion is one goal though certainly, it's just not the only goal, and nor is it necessarily the primary goal. I suspect though, that when robotics are good enough to outdo humans, rather than creating new intelligent robots, we'll be more interested in storing the human mind, in a possibly augmented and improved form on these robots so that said humans can live indefinitely in these robot bodies, only requiring replacement parts or upgrades once every few decades. Effectively controlling artificial beings, with real, natural, human intelligence.
I do generally agree with you, but I can see why some would say that some things were worse.
Music, Dance and other cultural elements weren't something commercialised, that you could be sent to jail for copying.
More prominently though I would argue the issue of sexuality has actually gotten far less liberal in recent times. The age of consent has arrived, and gotten ever higher in some countries, homosexuality was much more widely accepted historically than it is now.
Also, people were generally healthier because they didn't have cars, didn't have TVs and so forth.
Really, it depends on your viewpoint, whilst the age of consent is a good thing in protecting young children, it's a clear form of oppression in countries where it's as high as 21, or even arguably 18. Similarly, I suppose all the homophobes in the world might prefer things now, but certainly I'd argue a less liberal world in this respect is a bad thing.
Oh, and my country still had the largest empire on Earth back then too.
Okay, okay, I was only kidding about the last one- that certainly wasn't a good thing for many people living under it!
If the media is controlled by the government in Australia, which seems unlikely, then it can indeed spin it that way. If however the media is independent and objective, then they should really report both that it was hacked, and why it was hacked, and as such will bring attention to the issue which should really be a good thing.
If the media is independent, but pro-Rudd, then yes, this will likely backfire, otherwise it shouldn't hurt.
Well yeah, I don't disagree with the fact not all users understand them, but I disagree entirely with your conclusion that that has any relevance to the story of the boy who cried wolf, because all error messages matter- there are no fake messages, no made up messages.
The issue is that users can't be bothered to investigate the problem, because after all it's only a computer right? Half the time they get away with it, the other half it comes back to bite them and they lose all their data, and learn the hard way.
It's really the same with cars, except a higher proportion of people pay attention to warning lights in cars because they're scared shitless if their car breaks whilst driving it'll kill them, many drivers still don't understand what the light means though but realise a warning is a warning, and seek professional support on it if they can't figure it out themselves. There's still a large amount of people out there that do ignore warning lights though, plenty of people drive round with the empty light on thinking oh I'll get some petrol soon, and then run out and need to be rescued.
See, the issue isn't the warnings, that there's too many, or lack of, the warnings are fine, they all alert to actual problems, they don't warn about non-existent problems or anything like that, the issue is simply that there are simply a lot of users out there who are lazy and like to play it lucky, half of them get bitten and lose all their data or whatever, the other half just get lucky, at least for now, chances are they'll join the other subset in getting bitten at some point.
She has to take it up with the retailer, they sold her dodgy goods. This is the same with any product, if you buy an item that is not legitimate then you wont get support from the producer, you have to deal with it through your retailer.
If your retailer has dissapeared, you can file a fraud complain with the police because they sold you an illegal copy as a legal copy and it is up to the police to track down the people involved.
What you say is true, but the key term is "well-coded", there are very few developers that could really produce a hand coded assembly program that runs better than something compiler optimized nowadays.
Further, the issue you have with C compilers and such was covered by the other poster to you- they compile to a generic x86 platform, whilst JIT will compile for the specific processor on the system it is running, this means that there are many circumstances in which Java apps will actually outperform C apps, at least post-JIT compilation of course!
"Modern JVMs and CPUs are fast enough that most of the time the difference isn't a big deal, just as modern C compilers are fast enough that we seldom bother with assembly anymore."
I disagree with this though, the point is that on most modern systems there isn't really a difference at all, for the above mentioned reason that JIT compiled code will nearly always at least match generically pre-compiled C, if not surpass it. You're right in general though, the argument that it shouldn't be difference because it's all machine code is false, because not all machine code is created equally, it's just important to realise also that JIT compiled apps need not be any less efficient than C compiled apps.
That's why to answer the original question above, the answer would be no, there will be no real performance difference between Android and the iPhone for this reason.
That's stupid, there's no possible way for an OS or even necessarily the hardware to tell if a few new bad clusters that have been found is just that, a slight glitch on the drive, or if it's a sign of the read/write head being only a short time away from crashing into the platters having just bumped it ever so slightly damaging those clusters.
It's far better to do what it does, and play it safe, than ignore what could possibly be a serious problem, otherwise people like you would whinge that Windows didn't tell you the drive was going to crash today.
Error detection is one thing, being able to predict when different types of hardware like the hard drive are going to fail is a fantasy. Sure with batteries and such you can give rough estimates, but you can't realistically predict when a hard drive, processor, RAM, optical drive or anything like that are going to specifically fail.
If there's even a slight error on a hard drive, it's time to backup and replace, sure it might keep on running as in the parents post, but you'd be stupid to keep risking your data on it.
"Bingo. If there's any story here, it's that Microsoft's reputation is so bad that people won't believe them even when they're right."
Or just that FOSS trolls like to make a non-story into a big story, because to the trolls of the community, pratting around with shit like that is apparently more important than actually providing better software, like, you know, versions of Open Office that are actually better than MS Office, versions of Eclipse that are actually better than Visual Studio and so on.
Really, if you think people would react any differently to the same errors popping up on Linux, or Mac OSX then you're delusional. People don't care until it finally stops working and really does actually effect them. I used to work in IT support some years back for schools, and we'd always tell teachers to keep a backup of any work they do on their laptop and none of them listened, but they all came crying when their laptop failed, was run over by a car, was dropped by a kid and so forth.
Windows really doesn't give alert after alert unless there's actually something wrong. If it's chucking up an error, then there is an error, it's really not hard to read the popup and see if it's an error you care about - sure you may choose to ignore "This computer has no anti-virus software installed on it, click here for help installing some" but then don't cry when you get a virus. Similarly, if it comes up and says "Windows delayed write failed" then yeah it's not easy for the average Joe to understand, but it's still good reason for them to figure that something isn't right, whether it's that they pulled out a USB pen drive in the middle of writing to it, or whether their hard drive is outright failing, the fact is, something went wrong, ignore it and accept the consequences. I've certainly never seen a popup in the tray that I "don't believe", because they've always alerted me to the facts, I'm not aware of any circumstances where Windows makes up errors for the sake of it.
I will inform you of errors, but it has to be sure they're errors.
For example, popping up a "Your hard drive is failing" message when the drive isn't actually failing, but someone has installed one too many drives for their PSU and as such the PSU is failing to provide enough power is unhelpful. It'll make people buy a replacement HDD, when what they needed was a more powerful PSU for example.
It's really best to leave diagnostics of these sorts of problems to professionals in this case, because they've been doing it long enough to know the symptoms don't necessarily point to the piece of hardware that's actually displaying the issue being at fault.
If Windows failed to write a piece of data for example, it will also provide you an error regarding this in the tray, it will also give errors when you try and read something that cannot be read. What it should not do is assume these are signs of a faulty hard drive though and just tell the user that, as it might be misleading.
The fact is, it's not even going to be close to 30 movies if you actually use the device, you need space for software, other media and so on too. Subtract the space for your apps, your music, photos and so on and the amount of movies will shrink drastically.
"I add and remove media from my iPod Touch all the time, and it takes perhaps a few minutes to check the things I want added before I resync it."
That's because the media is much smaller, try adding and removing 30gb of movies. Maybe you do, but I don't have time to prat around with stuff like that, I have better things to do. I thought Apple kit was supposed to "just work" and not leave you with hassles like this?
"iPads, iPods & iPhones aren't meant to store your entire media library."
That's a real shame, because the competition are, from the following Tablet with a 250gb hard drive, to countless netbooks with similar amounts of space:
"Do you complain about your car because you can't put your refrigerator & stove in it?"
Nope, do you buy a product with severe limitations when the competition offers a more flexible, more useful alternative though? This isn't about whether it can be done, it clearly can.
I'll try one last time, because I'm sure you can get it if you wanted to, but are purposely trying to miss the point because of ignorant fanboyism.
So here we go, simply now, step by step for you so it's not too difficult to take in:
1) Jobs stated Flash causes Macs to crash 2) A plugin should be incapable of making an OS crash if the OS is designed properly 3) You claimed the OS doesn't crash, it's the browser that crashes 4) The point still stands with the browser, if it's designed properly, a plugin wont make it crash
There are a number of outcomes, these are:
1) Point 1) is simply wrong, neither the OS or Safari can crash due to Flash so Jobs is lying 2) You are wrong, Mac OS is poorly designed and Flash can make it crash, but Jobs is not lying 3) You are right in that Safari could crash due to a plugin and so was badly designed, you claim this is now fixed, so Jobs was still lying
Finally, I'll state the conclusion again, because that seems to have been a bit complicated again for you too. We'll try it step by step again for you, so that it's not too hard for you to consume this time because apparently it was when it was written in structured sentences and paragraphs:
1) No one is defending Adobe, we know it's buggy 2) What we are saying, is that Apple's software is also buggy/poorly designed if Jobs is not lying about it being able to crash the OS/Safari 3) Hence, you are actually the one defending buggy software if Jobs isn't lying. If he is lying, you're simply covering that.
Is that okay now? Not too complicated this time now it's stated clearly so that you can all by yourself easily come to the same logical conclusions that the factual premises lead to?
No one is blaming JUST the platform buggy code runs on, they are blaming the fact that modern platforms should take into account buggy code and handle them properly, else they are just badly designed. As such, once again, I'll state it clearly for you, Apple is as much to blame as Adobe OR Steve Jobs is lying- again, take your pick. Reaching logical conclusions based on clearly laid out facts really doesn't have to be as hard as you're making it for yourself.
You're right that a large percentage of the population suffer disability, but you're wrong to assume that the same percentage require additional accessibility support with software.
That percentage includes things like Aspergers, ADHD, Depression, Epilepsy, Autism, ME, in some countries even obesity is included. None of these really prevent people using standard interfaces apart from in the most extreme circumstances.
So the percentage of people who actually need accessibility support from a development standpoint is drastically lower than the percentage of people with just some disability- no matter how mild it is.
It seems to be a growing trend- accessibility doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Just 5 to 10 years ago, it was a big deal, people made sure to factor it in to web design and so forth, but now we're at a stage where HTML5 is on the horizon, and it's added a load of new features without any care for accessibility- canvas and the video tag for example, in the case of the latter there really should've been the option to supply subtitles as an element parameter meaning even if people didn't want to supply subtitles themselves, 3rd parties could then for example, but instead the onus has been put on the content creator to place them in the video, unfortunately this method is also not parsable.
That, and this news are just two of many examples of a move away from a regime where accessibility is taken into account.
Maybe they're right, maybe we should stop caring about accessibility because in a way it requires a disproportionate amount of development time in relation to the amount of people actually served by it, but I always figured accessibility is just the right thing to do so that these people aren't left out.
Perhaps it is just a response to the tightening of belts over the last couple of years? Companies feel they can no longer afford to spend time on accessibility and it's just the core product that matters now?
You do realise that there is a legal separation between the government and the BBC right?
The BBC exists by royal mandate, it is entirely separate from government and the government has no influence over it. This is exactly what makes the BBC one of the least bias news sources out there, because any bias can only exist at an individual level, and even then is accountable to the BBC Trust which oversees it. It also has a mandate to transparently handle complaints- the same can't be said of commercial channels like Sky news for example, who may choose to just ignore your complaint and broadcast whatever they wish within the bounds of the law.
Interestingly, this is also why the BBC has historically been able to get reporters where many other Western news channels have struggled, for example Alan Johnston in Gaza before his kidnap and eventual release. The BBC's objectivity is recognised world wide, there are a few exceptions, for example, the current Iranian leadership, but the Taliban for example have also been willing to give interviews where others have struggled.
The BBC's somewhat unique situation is actually good for a lot of televised British news in general because it forces other media outlets to raise the bar somewhat also- Channel 4 News, ITV News for example are of very high quality in comparison to the likes of Fox, and even many Newspapers such as The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and so forth.
Oh I understand what The Register was originally, what it was intended to be (I'm British, we invented that type of humour thanks), and what it kept true to for a long while, but in recent years, perhaps the last 3 or 4 it's strayed much further than that, and been hijacked to push certain agendas. It is not merely a case of hating everybody, I understand they have a very sarcastic negative slant, but you'll notice reoccuring themes that gone well beyond hating everybody. Examples range from climate change, to persistent character assasination of people like Jimmy Wales, to pro-RIAA agenda, to a heavily anti-Google agenda, to often outright false/incorrect opinion pieces on the British military related matters.
What's notable is for some of these repeated themse (pro-RIAA agenda, Climate change) you'll find a strong correlation with prevention of comment posting, or manipulation of comment posting. There is a clear difference between posting news articles with a sarcastic tone, and persistently pursuing certain targets with zeal, and with a clear attempt to manipulate published public opinion of visitors to the site.
If Safari wont crash because of a faulty plugin then your earlier assertion that Jobs was talking about Safari rather than MacOSX doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
If you think test driven code = immunity to bugs you know nothing about software development. Still, I agree, Adobe has a lot of work to do, but the point is that Jobs said Adobe Flash was crashing Macs, so again, as was said to you, either their OS is crap, Safari is crap, or Jobs is lying. It's still got to be one of the three however you cut it, take your pick as to which one, don't pick one, then tell us actually it's not that one, and then try and divert the focus away from Apple altogether.
No one is denying Flash is buggy, the point in this thread is that if Apple software crashes as a result of buggy Adobe software as Jobs has claimed, then it raises questions about Apple's software too.
Effectively it's a non-story, hyped up into a story by typical The Register anti-Google trolling.
I don't like a lot of things Google does, particularly Schmidt's "done nothing wrong, got nothing to hide" style comments, but really, non-stories like this are just utterly stupid and as they're part of The Register's agenda based bullshit wagon, don't even deserve to be entertained.
Well you're right, there's no such thing as truly unbiased news.
But certainly there are extremely biased sources, and it's certainly the case that Fox is one of those sources.
The likes of the BBC are generally much more unbiased, because they exist without needing to answer to shareholders and in fact, have a legal duty in many cases to avoid bias. Whilst you do get cases of individual bias with the BBC, they are just that, and multiple reporters with multiple views will post on the same topics, meaning the likely hood of some inherent bias is much lower than in places like Fox, where people are employed specifically with the goal of a pre-defined agenda.
So yeah, it's hard to find an entirely objective source, but suggesting the likes of the BBC for example are on par with Fox and The Register in terms of bias and zealotry of their agenda is really quite ignorant. The BBC for example does not censor comments for starters based on anything other than a set of objective rules which are clearly laid out and adhered to. They have a proper process for ensuring that anyone who believes their moderation was unfair can appeal.
This is what happens when people read The Register.
I don't even know why Slashdot links there anymore, it's become such a stupid site, it really is worse than Fox News nowadays.
The issue is that The Register really isn't a news site anymore, it's a pressure group passing itself off as a news site. You'll note many of Andrew Orlowski's articles there for example are full of outright lies, often there is no opportunity to comment on his stories, but when there is they are heavily moderated such that any disagreeing viewpoint is not accepted through. Even if they are, Andrew himself generally deletes them shortly afterwards. He claims it's because he likes correspondence direct to his e-mail, but obviously that misses the point of a comments section which is that it enables discussion with peers on the topic. As seen by his constant congratulations to himself in his articles- things like "I was the only one anyone in the audience applauded", "I was first to unveil the news on this" it's pretty clear what his real problem is, he's an attention seeker, and worse an insecure one, who can't take criticism even when he bluntly knows he's not being honest.
But it's not just Andrew Orlowski, Google is one of The Registers targets of hate along with Wikipedia and some others, as such you cannot treat anything coming from there with any real seriousness. They constantly attack Jimmy Wales for example, and whilst he's far from perfect, let's face it, he's contributed far more to the web with the creation of Wikipedia than anyone at The Register ever has or likely ever will.
It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so hypocritical, they for example launch attacks on climatologists with the arguments of them not being open enough, not being willing to accept criticism, and then in the very same articles they go and block comments either altogether or from anyone dissenting from their viewpoint, anyone pointing out errors in their analysis and so forth. Point out enough errors in their articles, even if you keep yourself reasonable about it, even if you backup your point with perfectly legitimate sources and so forth and eventually your account will just break and you'll get a "Sorry, there was a problem logging in, please contact the webmaster" - any attempt to get your account "fixed" is simply ignored, it's quite clear what their game is. But worse, they sometimes even give the impression they allow dissent with things like "Andrew's mailbag", they will post dissenting comments here, but they'll be very carefully selected, and swamped with counter-comments attacking back, with no right to reply again.
Really, this Google domain is no big deal- it is after all no different to the likes of Akamai domains and so forth which spuriously appear but which no one questions in the same. It's really just a case of The Register making a story where there isn't one, trying to make Google look evil when there's really no big deal. The result is though we get people like have posted here on Slashdot in response to this article, who fall for The Register's agenda, shit bricks and start blocking said hosts when there's really no need unless you're so paranoid that you probably shouldn't be on the internet anyway.
The Register is as agenda based as Fox News and really does not deserve the slightest bit of attention, it's best to just leave it to rot as an "also ran" in the internet's list of IT news sites.
Excellent post, it's just a shame the Tories will almost certainly get in next and their only public stance on it so far is that they agree but feel Labour should have done it all even sooner than they have.
Slashdot Mirror
Shhh, Jobs might hear you... ...er, I mean Kim, yes Kim, not Jobs. Sorry, easy mistake to make.
I guess you've never tried to buy and install Mac OS X on your own (yet perfectly compatible) hardware, or wanted to try peeking into the memory of certain processes.
"How could you be sent to jail for copying, if you couldn't copy it?"
Really? you can't understand how a performance might be copied without some kind of equipment to do it for you?
"Yeah, before when girls were married to whoever their parents chose was extremely liberal."
What has that got to do with sexuality? That's entirely irrelevant to anything I said.
"And homosexuality? Tell me again why Oscar Wilde was imprisoned? Or are you talking about before, when the inquisition merely burned them?"
Try looking further back, or to different regions. In fact, homosexuality was deeply rooted in Roman culture for example.
"Are you kidding me? Do you know what the average life expectancy was, back then? Or the child mortality rates? Life expectancy in the US has risen more than 25 years during the 20th Century!"
You don't really seem to understand the relevance of medicine here. People now are certainly not healthier- we have a greatly higher proportion of people with obesity, asthma and so forth. All that has changed is that we've gotten better at keeping the unhealthy alive, that doesn't mean that people are more healthy though. Better medicine increasing survivability does not imply that people are more healthy, it just means it's easier to survive when unhealthy.
I'm not sure why you seem to have taken so much offence to my post, I was merely pointing out that not everything is better, it clearly isn't, particularly in an era where the effects of overpopulation are becoming quite clear in many different ways from severe deforestation, over-fishing, pollution of vital water sources and so on. I would still rather live in the modern world personally, but that doesn't mean I'm unable to recognise that not everything is better.
I assume you mean that's "one idea behind AI"?
Most AI researchers do not have such grand goals. Everything from spellcheckers to hand writing recognition, to Google's search algorithms are the result of AI.
Certainly not everyone is trying or even wants to produce strong AI, the goal behind AI in general is simply to produce less dumb systems.
AI is a very misunderstood subject, and articles like this really don't help. Asking the question when AI will surpass human intelligence sounds like it's coming from someone who just hasn't learnt a thing about AI and it's history. AI is seen by many as a failure precisely because a fringe few keep pursuing this idea that we're just 5 to 10 years away from robots which we can't tell apart from humans when that's really an absurd goal when we're so far away from having computers capable of that level of processing, assuming we even know what computer architecture is required for such a level of intelligence. These predictions hurt the field so much and give it such a bad reputation as they consistently end up being false and yet, if it weren't for AI from real researchers who have more reasonable goals right now, we wouldn't have any of the search and data mining algorithms we have today, we wouldn't have handwriting recognition, voice recognition, we wouldn't have half as efficient networking protocols and so on.
The fruits of AI research are everywhere, it's silly to suggest AI only has such a narrow focus on a target that, with current knowledge, is so far from being possible we can't even begin to predict when it'll be possible. We may have a breakthrough tommorrow that allows it to happen within 6 months, or we may have no breakthrough at all and have to wait 50 years for high end, flexible quantum computers or biological computers to be capable of it and for us to have to figured out the required algorithms to run on them. This is why the question in the title is a really stupid one to ask- because simply put, no one can possibly even give a reasonable estimate, they can at best make a guess which may or may not end up being right.
So for many AI researchers that actually produce meaningful research, the goal is still better data mining algorithms, better algorithms for solving or finding acceptable approximations for COPs and so forth. Even when we do finally have the hardware and knowledge to produce intelligent systems your assertion that it'll be about improving itself in all dimensions will likely prove false, we might want a system that can tell us the solution to a moral dilemma, but if that moral dilemma is about someone blackmailing us, we likely wont want the system to be able to figure out how to walk and fire a gun, and then go and shoot the person doing the blackmailing, there will still be restrictions on how far you want it to go.
I do agree that your suggestion is one goal though certainly, it's just not the only goal, and nor is it necessarily the primary goal. I suspect though, that when robotics are good enough to outdo humans, rather than creating new intelligent robots, we'll be more interested in storing the human mind, in a possibly augmented and improved form on these robots so that said humans can live indefinitely in these robot bodies, only requiring replacement parts or upgrades once every few decades. Effectively controlling artificial beings, with real, natural, human intelligence.
I do generally agree with you, but I can see why some would say that some things were worse.
Music, Dance and other cultural elements weren't something commercialised, that you could be sent to jail for copying.
More prominently though I would argue the issue of sexuality has actually gotten far less liberal in recent times. The age of consent has arrived, and gotten ever higher in some countries, homosexuality was much more widely accepted historically than it is now.
Also, people were generally healthier because they didn't have cars, didn't have TVs and so forth.
Really, it depends on your viewpoint, whilst the age of consent is a good thing in protecting young children, it's a clear form of oppression in countries where it's as high as 21, or even arguably 18. Similarly, I suppose all the homophobes in the world might prefer things now, but certainly I'd argue a less liberal world in this respect is a bad thing.
Oh, and my country still had the largest empire on Earth back then too.
Okay, okay, I was only kidding about the last one- that certainly wasn't a good thing for many people living under it!
It really depends how independent the media is.
If the media is controlled by the government in Australia, which seems unlikely, then it can indeed spin it that way. If however the media is independent and objective, then they should really report both that it was hacked, and why it was hacked, and as such will bring attention to the issue which should really be a good thing.
If the media is independent, but pro-Rudd, then yes, this will likely backfire, otherwise it shouldn't hurt.
Well yeah, I don't disagree with the fact not all users understand them, but I disagree entirely with your conclusion that that has any relevance to the story of the boy who cried wolf, because all error messages matter- there are no fake messages, no made up messages.
The issue is that users can't be bothered to investigate the problem, because after all it's only a computer right? Half the time they get away with it, the other half it comes back to bite them and they lose all their data, and learn the hard way.
It's really the same with cars, except a higher proportion of people pay attention to warning lights in cars because they're scared shitless if their car breaks whilst driving it'll kill them, many drivers still don't understand what the light means though but realise a warning is a warning, and seek professional support on it if they can't figure it out themselves. There's still a large amount of people out there that do ignore warning lights though, plenty of people drive round with the empty light on thinking oh I'll get some petrol soon, and then run out and need to be rescued.
See, the issue isn't the warnings, that there's too many, or lack of, the warnings are fine, they all alert to actual problems, they don't warn about non-existent problems or anything like that, the issue is simply that there are simply a lot of users out there who are lazy and like to play it lucky, half of them get bitten and lose all their data or whatever, the other half just get lucky, at least for now, chances are they'll join the other subset in getting bitten at some point.
Well yeah, it is her problem.
She has to take it up with the retailer, they sold her dodgy goods. This is the same with any product, if you buy an item that is not legitimate then you wont get support from the producer, you have to deal with it through your retailer.
If your retailer has dissapeared, you can file a fraud complain with the police because they sold you an illegal copy as a legal copy and it is up to the police to track down the people involved.
"Thanks for the helping hand Microsoft, I'm much happier now."
Yes, you sound it too!
What you say is true, but the key term is "well-coded", there are very few developers that could really produce a hand coded assembly program that runs better than something compiler optimized nowadays.
Further, the issue you have with C compilers and such was covered by the other poster to you- they compile to a generic x86 platform, whilst JIT will compile for the specific processor on the system it is running, this means that there are many circumstances in which Java apps will actually outperform C apps, at least post-JIT compilation of course!
"Modern JVMs and CPUs are fast enough that most of the time the difference isn't a big deal, just as modern C compilers are fast enough that we seldom bother with assembly anymore."
I disagree with this though, the point is that on most modern systems there isn't really a difference at all, for the above mentioned reason that JIT compiled code will nearly always at least match generically pre-compiled C, if not surpass it. You're right in general though, the argument that it shouldn't be difference because it's all machine code is false, because not all machine code is created equally, it's just important to realise also that JIT compiled apps need not be any less efficient than C compiled apps.
That's why to answer the original question above, the answer would be no, there will be no real performance difference between Android and the iPhone for this reason.
That's stupid, there's no possible way for an OS or even necessarily the hardware to tell if a few new bad clusters that have been found is just that, a slight glitch on the drive, or if it's a sign of the read/write head being only a short time away from crashing into the platters having just bumped it ever so slightly damaging those clusters.
It's far better to do what it does, and play it safe, than ignore what could possibly be a serious problem, otherwise people like you would whinge that Windows didn't tell you the drive was going to crash today.
Error detection is one thing, being able to predict when different types of hardware like the hard drive are going to fail is a fantasy. Sure with batteries and such you can give rough estimates, but you can't realistically predict when a hard drive, processor, RAM, optical drive or anything like that are going to specifically fail.
If there's even a slight error on a hard drive, it's time to backup and replace, sure it might keep on running as in the parents post, but you'd be stupid to keep risking your data on it.
"Bingo. If there's any story here, it's that Microsoft's reputation is so bad that people won't believe them even when they're right."
Or just that FOSS trolls like to make a non-story into a big story, because to the trolls of the community, pratting around with shit like that is apparently more important than actually providing better software, like, you know, versions of Open Office that are actually better than MS Office, versions of Eclipse that are actually better than Visual Studio and so on.
Really, if you think people would react any differently to the same errors popping up on Linux, or Mac OSX then you're delusional. People don't care until it finally stops working and really does actually effect them. I used to work in IT support some years back for schools, and we'd always tell teachers to keep a backup of any work they do on their laptop and none of them listened, but they all came crying when their laptop failed, was run over by a car, was dropped by a kid and so forth.
Windows really doesn't give alert after alert unless there's actually something wrong. If it's chucking up an error, then there is an error, it's really not hard to read the popup and see if it's an error you care about - sure you may choose to ignore "This computer has no anti-virus software installed on it, click here for help installing some" but then don't cry when you get a virus. Similarly, if it comes up and says "Windows delayed write failed" then yeah it's not easy for the average Joe to understand, but it's still good reason for them to figure that something isn't right, whether it's that they pulled out a USB pen drive in the middle of writing to it, or whether their hard drive is outright failing, the fact is, something went wrong, ignore it and accept the consequences. I've certainly never seen a popup in the tray that I "don't believe", because they've always alerted me to the facts, I'm not aware of any circumstances where Windows makes up errors for the sake of it.
I will inform you of errors, but it has to be sure they're errors.
For example, popping up a "Your hard drive is failing" message when the drive isn't actually failing, but someone has installed one too many drives for their PSU and as such the PSU is failing to provide enough power is unhelpful. It'll make people buy a replacement HDD, when what they needed was a more powerful PSU for example.
It's really best to leave diagnostics of these sorts of problems to professionals in this case, because they've been doing it long enough to know the symptoms don't necessarily point to the piece of hardware that's actually displaying the issue being at fault.
If Windows failed to write a piece of data for example, it will also provide you an error regarding this in the tray, it will also give errors when you try and read something that cannot be read. What it should not do is assume these are signs of a faulty hard drive though and just tell the user that, as it might be misleading.
The fact is, it's not even going to be close to 30 movies if you actually use the device, you need space for software, other media and so on too. Subtract the space for your apps, your music, photos and so on and the amount of movies will shrink drastically.
"I add and remove media from my iPod Touch all the time, and it takes perhaps a few minutes to check the things I want added before I resync it."
That's because the media is much smaller, try adding and removing 30gb of movies. Maybe you do, but I don't have time to prat around with stuff like that, I have better things to do. I thought Apple kit was supposed to "just work" and not leave you with hassles like this?
"iPads, iPods & iPhones aren't meant to store your entire media library."
That's a real shame, because the competition are, from the following Tablet with a 250gb hard drive, to countless netbooks with similar amounts of space:
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/the-x2-itablet-windows-7-tablet-05-02-2010/
"Do you complain about your car because you can't put your refrigerator & stove in it?"
Nope, do you buy a product with severe limitations when the competition offers a more flexible, more useful alternative though? This isn't about whether it can be done, it clearly can.
I'll try one last time, because I'm sure you can get it if you wanted to, but are purposely trying to miss the point because of ignorant fanboyism.
So here we go, simply now, step by step for you so it's not too difficult to take in:
1) Jobs stated Flash causes Macs to crash
2) A plugin should be incapable of making an OS crash if the OS is designed properly
3) You claimed the OS doesn't crash, it's the browser that crashes
4) The point still stands with the browser, if it's designed properly, a plugin wont make it crash
There are a number of outcomes, these are:
1) Point 1) is simply wrong, neither the OS or Safari can crash due to Flash so Jobs is lying
2) You are wrong, Mac OS is poorly designed and Flash can make it crash, but Jobs is not lying
3) You are right in that Safari could crash due to a plugin and so was badly designed, you claim this is now fixed, so Jobs was still lying
Finally, I'll state the conclusion again, because that seems to have been a bit complicated again for you too. We'll try it step by step again for you, so that it's not too hard for you to consume this time because apparently it was when it was written in structured sentences and paragraphs:
1) No one is defending Adobe, we know it's buggy
2) What we are saying, is that Apple's software is also buggy/poorly designed if Jobs is not lying about it being able to crash the OS/Safari
3) Hence, you are actually the one defending buggy software if Jobs isn't lying. If he is lying, you're simply covering that.
Is that okay now? Not too complicated this time now it's stated clearly so that you can all by yourself easily come to the same logical conclusions that the factual premises lead to?
No one is blaming JUST the platform buggy code runs on, they are blaming the fact that modern platforms should take into account buggy code and handle them properly, else they are just badly designed. As such, once again, I'll state it clearly for you, Apple is as much to blame as Adobe OR Steve Jobs is lying- again, take your pick. Reaching logical conclusions based on clearly laid out facts really doesn't have to be as hard as you're making it for yourself.
You're right that a large percentage of the population suffer disability, but you're wrong to assume that the same percentage require additional accessibility support with software.
That percentage includes things like Aspergers, ADHD, Depression, Epilepsy, Autism, ME, in some countries even obesity is included. None of these really prevent people using standard interfaces apart from in the most extreme circumstances.
So the percentage of people who actually need accessibility support from a development standpoint is drastically lower than the percentage of people with just some disability- no matter how mild it is.
"You're right about this one. Why was this even a question to begin with?"
Because 64gb isn't enough for everybody.
Particularly on a device which I'd imagine many people would want to use for watching movies.
The disk space is really quite a severe limitation of the device for many people.
It seems to be a growing trend- accessibility doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Just 5 to 10 years ago, it was a big deal, people made sure to factor it in to web design and so forth, but now we're at a stage where HTML5 is on the horizon, and it's added a load of new features without any care for accessibility- canvas and the video tag for example, in the case of the latter there really should've been the option to supply subtitles as an element parameter meaning even if people didn't want to supply subtitles themselves, 3rd parties could then for example, but instead the onus has been put on the content creator to place them in the video, unfortunately this method is also not parsable.
That, and this news are just two of many examples of a move away from a regime where accessibility is taken into account.
Maybe they're right, maybe we should stop caring about accessibility because in a way it requires a disproportionate amount of development time in relation to the amount of people actually served by it, but I always figured accessibility is just the right thing to do so that these people aren't left out.
Perhaps it is just a response to the tightening of belts over the last couple of years? Companies feel they can no longer afford to spend time on accessibility and it's just the core product that matters now?
You do realise that there is a legal separation between the government and the BBC right?
The BBC exists by royal mandate, it is entirely separate from government and the government has no influence over it. This is exactly what makes the BBC one of the least bias news sources out there, because any bias can only exist at an individual level, and even then is accountable to the BBC Trust which oversees it. It also has a mandate to transparently handle complaints- the same can't be said of commercial channels like Sky news for example, who may choose to just ignore your complaint and broadcast whatever they wish within the bounds of the law.
Interestingly, this is also why the BBC has historically been able to get reporters where many other Western news channels have struggled, for example Alan Johnston in Gaza before his kidnap and eventual release. The BBC's objectivity is recognised world wide, there are a few exceptions, for example, the current Iranian leadership, but the Taliban for example have also been willing to give interviews where others have struggled.
The BBC's somewhat unique situation is actually good for a lot of televised British news in general because it forces other media outlets to raise the bar somewhat also- Channel 4 News, ITV News for example are of very high quality in comparison to the likes of Fox, and even many Newspapers such as The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and so forth.
Oh I understand what The Register was originally, what it was intended to be (I'm British, we invented that type of humour thanks), and what it kept true to for a long while, but in recent years, perhaps the last 3 or 4 it's strayed much further than that, and been hijacked to push certain agendas. It is not merely a case of hating everybody, I understand they have a very sarcastic negative slant, but you'll notice reoccuring themes that gone well beyond hating everybody. Examples range from climate change, to persistent character assasination of people like Jimmy Wales, to pro-RIAA agenda, to a heavily anti-Google agenda, to often outright false/incorrect opinion pieces on the British military related matters.
What's notable is for some of these repeated themse (pro-RIAA agenda, Climate change) you'll find a strong correlation with prevention of comment posting, or manipulation of comment posting. There is a clear difference between posting news articles with a sarcastic tone, and persistently pursuing certain targets with zeal, and with a clear attempt to manipulate published public opinion of visitors to the site.
You realise you just contradicted yourself?
If Safari wont crash because of a faulty plugin then your earlier assertion that Jobs was talking about Safari rather than MacOSX doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
If you think test driven code = immunity to bugs you know nothing about software development. Still, I agree, Adobe has a lot of work to do, but the point is that Jobs said Adobe Flash was crashing Macs, so again, as was said to you, either their OS is crap, Safari is crap, or Jobs is lying. It's still got to be one of the three however you cut it, take your pick as to which one, don't pick one, then tell us actually it's not that one, and then try and divert the focus away from Apple altogether.
No one is denying Flash is buggy, the point in this thread is that if Apple software crashes as a result of buggy Adobe software as Jobs has claimed, then it raises questions about Apple's software too.
Rather than repeat myself, see my post here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1541436&cid=31060452
Effectively it's a non-story, hyped up into a story by typical The Register anti-Google trolling.
I don't like a lot of things Google does, particularly Schmidt's "done nothing wrong, got nothing to hide" style comments, but really, non-stories like this are just utterly stupid and as they're part of The Register's agenda based bullshit wagon, don't even deserve to be entertained.
Well you're right, there's no such thing as truly unbiased news.
But certainly there are extremely biased sources, and it's certainly the case that Fox is one of those sources.
The likes of the BBC are generally much more unbiased, because they exist without needing to answer to shareholders and in fact, have a legal duty in many cases to avoid bias. Whilst you do get cases of individual bias with the BBC, they are just that, and multiple reporters with multiple views will post on the same topics, meaning the likely hood of some inherent bias is much lower than in places like Fox, where people are employed specifically with the goal of a pre-defined agenda.
So yeah, it's hard to find an entirely objective source, but suggesting the likes of the BBC for example are on par with Fox and The Register in terms of bias and zealotry of their agenda is really quite ignorant. The BBC for example does not censor comments for starters based on anything other than a set of objective rules which are clearly laid out and adhered to. They have a proper process for ensuring that anyone who believes their moderation was unfair can appeal.
This is what happens when people read The Register.
I don't even know why Slashdot links there anymore, it's become such a stupid site, it really is worse than Fox News nowadays.
The issue is that The Register really isn't a news site anymore, it's a pressure group passing itself off as a news site. You'll note many of Andrew Orlowski's articles there for example are full of outright lies, often there is no opportunity to comment on his stories, but when there is they are heavily moderated such that any disagreeing viewpoint is not accepted through. Even if they are, Andrew himself generally deletes them shortly afterwards. He claims it's because he likes correspondence direct to his e-mail, but obviously that misses the point of a comments section which is that it enables discussion with peers on the topic. As seen by his constant congratulations to himself in his articles- things like "I was the only one anyone in the audience applauded", "I was first to unveil the news on this" it's pretty clear what his real problem is, he's an attention seeker, and worse an insecure one, who can't take criticism even when he bluntly knows he's not being honest.
But it's not just Andrew Orlowski, Google is one of The Registers targets of hate along with Wikipedia and some others, as such you cannot treat anything coming from there with any real seriousness. They constantly attack Jimmy Wales for example, and whilst he's far from perfect, let's face it, he's contributed far more to the web with the creation of Wikipedia than anyone at The Register ever has or likely ever will.
It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so hypocritical, they for example launch attacks on climatologists with the arguments of them not being open enough, not being willing to accept criticism, and then in the very same articles they go and block comments either altogether or from anyone dissenting from their viewpoint, anyone pointing out errors in their analysis and so forth. Point out enough errors in their articles, even if you keep yourself reasonable about it, even if you backup your point with perfectly legitimate sources and so forth and eventually your account will just break and you'll get a "Sorry, there was a problem logging in, please contact the webmaster" - any attempt to get your account "fixed" is simply ignored, it's quite clear what their game is. But worse, they sometimes even give the impression they allow dissent with things like "Andrew's mailbag", they will post dissenting comments here, but they'll be very carefully selected, and swamped with counter-comments attacking back, with no right to reply again.
Really, this Google domain is no big deal- it is after all no different to the likes of Akamai domains and so forth which spuriously appear but which no one questions in the same. It's really just a case of The Register making a story where there isn't one, trying to make Google look evil when there's really no big deal. The result is though we get people like have posted here on Slashdot in response to this article, who fall for The Register's agenda, shit bricks and start blocking said hosts when there's really no need unless you're so paranoid that you probably shouldn't be on the internet anyway.
The Register is as agenda based as Fox News and really does not deserve the slightest bit of attention, it's best to just leave it to rot as an "also ran" in the internet's list of IT news sites.
Excellent post, it's just a shame the Tories will almost certainly get in next and their only public stance on it so far is that they agree but feel Labour should have done it all even sooner than they have.
So unfortunately, we're fucked either way.