What a dumb study. Of course you can pick a party affiliation by appearance. First off, if you always say a black guy is a Democrat, you'd be right 90% of the time, based on voting records. That would give you 60% overall correct, even if everything else was 50,50, assuming a sample set that roughly mirrors the population.
Of course, if you RTFA, the photos of other students were all Caucasian. So if you always said a "black guy" was a Democrat, it wouldn't have any effect on the results at all.
Explain exactly how the 'walled garden' has any direct effect on 1 or 2?
It has a direct effect on #1 (which was, again, that I plan not to replace the phone with another iPhone when it needs to be replaced) because it limits choice.
It doesn't have a direct effect on #2 (the fact that I don't plan to spend lots of money purchasing anything that depends on the expectation that I will continue to have an iPhone), which I stated was a direct consequence of #1, not the walled garden itself. Of course, #1 is a direct consequence of the walled garden.
Its not like the app store isn't full of free apps, and since most apps are a couple bucks at most, I find your definition of expensive to be... well, something even a homeless man wouldn't say.
Uh, the free, $1, and $2 (and even $5) apps aren't the "expensive apps" I said I wasn't going to buy. Saying "I'm not going to buy expensive apps as a result of the walled garden" isn't the same thing as saying "I'm not going to buy any iPhone apps, all of which are expensive". What I said was what I meant. Your argument against something different is, well, misdirected, at best.
Ten years ago, would anyone have predicted that products like the iPhone or the Kindle could possibly have any success at all?
Probably; the Blackberry, while less technology advanced, pretty much was a "product like the iPhone" 10 years ago.
Somehow, in the last decade, the personal computer market has accepted (in the sense of people actually spend money on some of the products) that personal computers don't need to be totally open to developers
I don't think the "personal computer" market has done that all.
The market for a number of completely new devices that sit somewhere between traditional PCs and older mobile devices that had completely fixed functionality with no third-party apps (or even first-party apps besides those pre-installed) has accepted that limited openness to developers is acceptable (and I'm not even sure that those markets have really accepted that, so much as having lacked viable, price-competitive alternatives that aren't severely disadvantaged by the tightly-controlled dominant player was well-established first and has a major pre-existing network effect advantage.)
Do you think perhaps that for the tens of millions of people who've bought an iPhone and seemingly like it, really don't care that much?
I bought an iPhone -- seemed to be the best price for features at the time I bought it -- and I like it, but I do, in fact, care about the walled garden, and its the one big negative of the phone, and the biggest reason that (1) I expect to replace it with something else, probably Android-based, when the time comes to replace it, and (2) I don't by expensive apps for the phone, as a direct consequence of #1.
Though, ironically perhaps, if good rich HTML5 apps that work on the iPhone take off, I might stay with iPhone (though I still wouldn't buy expensive native apps through the app store), so, for me at least, Google is mitigating my concerns with the walled garden rather than highlighting them.
If the call itself is made using regular voice minutes, then I can't see why Apple or AT&T would have a complaint.
Apple's problem is probably, I would guess, that the GVoice UI is commoditizing most of the phone-related features that are phone-functionality selling points for the iPhone.
AT&T's problem is probably the free SMS with convenient forwarding options, and the phone forwarding options and visual/web-based voice mail that provide alternatives to services for which AT&T charges fees (SMS, and airtime to access voice mail), and the fact that it provides alternative contact management and voicemail storage so that its even easier to switch phones and service providers that government-mandated portability of phone numbers makes it.
In both cases, the problems are around GV weakening lock-in to the companies respective products and services.
So does this explain why you can stick "random" genes into a completely different organism and gain traits that wouldn't arise normally? This seems like it'll be very useful in GE if the mechanics of it are explored more.
Well, except that the mechanisms involved in horizontal gene transfer are already key tools in genetic engineering. The notionally big deal here is the idea that because of the dominance of horizontal gene transfer as a primary mechanism of gene transfer, there was a time when organism-centered evolution wasn't the primary mode of evolution, and that instead the units on which evolution operated were genes themselves. The case has been made previously (and popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene) that while organisms are convenient proxies in lots of cases, genes ought to be considered the unit on which selection works even now, and that doing so was both more practically useful and more sensible in terms of the logical coherence of the model than using the organism as the fundamental unit on which evolution works.
In any case, it may be a mistake to contrast this with "Darwinian evolution" particularly in the "modern sense", since Darwinian evolution is recognized as a general process which applies when certain factors are present, no matter what the unit on which it works happens to be (and this generality is important to its applications in machine learning and is at the heart of the concept of memetics.)
ahh no that isn't at all what i said. what i mean is, is there really any difference between UNR and Ubuntu besides like one or two packages and a hotkey mapping. Couldn't that just be included as a prompt after the nic works to install the NBR package and the hotkey mappings based on your model that can be found using dmidecode. If i change a splash screen and add a game should i really call it another name than the distro it is? Is there really that much change in the NBR is what I am getting at?
A non-technical end user will often be happier with a maximally streamlined configuration process, and I think that's the main target of NBR. A technical user can just use base Ubuntu and customize it to their tastes.
Chances are if they have Word on their home desktop or other laptop, it's an OEM copy that came will their Dell or whatever. Not easy to load on the netbook, and the licensing is questionable.
If, like many desktops, it came with a time-limited Office Home and Student demo, which most Windows (XP Home and 7 Starter and Home Premium) netbooks also come with, and they spent the money once to buy a license for Home and Student for the desktop, when they get the netbook, they probably just have to enter the license information to activate it on the new system (Home and Student is normally licensed for up to 3 computers.)
Also, anyone know if Microsoft is lifting the hardware limits for Netbooks running Win 7?
There aren't any limits on Netbooks running Win 7. There might be for Win 7 Starter, but Win 7 Starter exists mostly to get netbook manufacturers to move off of XP -- and to sell end-users upgrades to Win 7 Home Premium once they run into the Starter limits.
The biggest hindrance so far has been Cloud Computing. Device manufacturers, rather than focusing on making their portables more powerful and useful on their own, have been banking on Cloud Computing to make their devices usable by offloading any strenuous processing.
This is quite obviously false; device makers continue to make laptops and other portable devices where power is a central focus, or at least one of several key focusses along with price and battery life. That's why there are notebooks using Core-series processors, and, on the lower end of the scale, netbooks using ION and the more powerful dual-core processors in the Atom line.
Device makers are also providing less-expensive, less-powerful portable devices that focus on non-power-user usage patterns that involve lots of web-browsing and light document editing, which don't require a lot of horsepower.
What people want is basically their desktop system, with the ability to run arbitrary applications and store the data locally, but compacted down into a portable device that can be used on the go. They don't want to host their data on some third-party servers, they don't want to use web-based applications, and they don't want to have their application selection limited by a single vendor or network operator.
I would suggest that not everyone wants what you think "people want", and that the market, both in terms of what gets made and what gets sold, reflect that diversity in interests.
The contract stipulates that Microsoft gets paid regardless of whether schools actually use their software. So while the schools may not be forced through contract to use MS software, it doesn't matter to Microsoft as they still get paid for non-existent software.
If its a national "collective agreement" and some schools don't use it, the agreement may still be a good deal if others do, just like a site license for software that isn't used on every machine that it could be under the terms of the license can be a good deal compared to licensing each machine individually.
Google Voice does not and cannot change the outgoing caller ID of any of your phones. Instead, the Google Voice server calls both of you at the same time (the number you're "dialing" using the Google Voice interface and the number of the phone you want to use on your end) and conferences them.
Google Voice does not, in fact, call your phone with the new app, which is the change from the previous mobile web app (which used the same model as the regular, non-mobile web interface, which calls back to one of your registered phones.)
The new app gives your phone a number to call and invokes the dialer of your phone, so you make an outgoing call, but to Google Voice, not the final destination of your call. Otherwise, it works the way you describe.
The useful stuff, making a call and receiving a call is done by forwarding incoming calls to your iPhone's number and by setting up a 3-way call where GV's PBX where it dials your iPhone and the dialed number.
Actually, no, that was the old way (and the mechanism still used by the "vanilla" Google Voice web interface you get if you aren't using an iPhone or, presumably, Android phone.) This new app actually uses the iPhone dialer to call into the GV PBX rather than calling back to the iPhone.
Yeah, this is impressive, but it will not function properly on an iPod Touch. Google needs to have a way to switch to a different mode of operation that is Touch compatible.
Google Voice isn't a VoIP service, its an SMS, voice mail, call routing and contact management service that requires an actual phone line to route voice calls to (or take them from); the only "mode of operation" that would be Touch compatible is the dial-back mode used on the basic website where placing a call has Google Voice call one of your phones to complete the call. Which I suppose might be useful if you had a touch and access to a phone that didn't have its own web connection.
sure wouldn't have thought letting a website access the microphone was a good idea.
Websites can't access the microphone, I don't think, but its immaterial, since Google Voice isn't a VoIP app and wouldn't have a use for the microphone.
Websites can request the phone to dial a number, which creates a pop-up window and requires active user confirmation to actually dial. It is this functionality which the Google Voice iPhone web app uses to place calls (it calls a Google Voice phone number, which is set up to route your call to the actual number you dialed via the web interface.)
Well thats why I'm wondering. Its no longer a native app - they're saying its a web app. Meaning you access it... Through the Web... So I imagine its like browsing the net on your IPhone.
Using the app UI is. Actually calling isn't like browing the web, though, as it uses the hooks Apple provides to the dialing functionality for web pages (originally, Apple focussed on web apps as the primary apps for the iPhone, and when they added native apps, they didn't remove that functionality.)
Note that you could use most of the Google Voice function from the existing mobile web app that they've had for a while, the only real change is that now, rather than using the dial-back system that the "vanilla" Google Voice web interface uses when making calls, calls dial out from your phone. And the UI is a bit prettier than the earlier web interface.
Back before the native iPhone app got stalled, there were some features you couldn't use from the "mobile" version of the web page, but it didn't take very long after the whole storm over Apple not allowing the native app for Google to add most of the functionality into the mobile web app. I think the only thing that is actually new (in terms of functionality rather than UI) in the new iPhone-targetted web app from the old generic mobile web app is access to account management features like forwarding settings, contact editing, etc. (and since the iPhone contacts have been able to sync with Google Voice's forever, you can already do the contact editing part from the iPhone's native contacts utility.)
This has given me a glimpse to a darker side of Indian offshore consulting, which I've actually talked a lot with several of my Indian colleagues who also agree on this: you can end up with a consulting firm that sells the idea of development guided by a a top-notch architect, and you swallow the tripe. And then the top-notch architect designs a system which looks solid, then he moves to another project.
So, you get exactly what was represented to you, no more and no less. That's what you ought to expect in any arm's-length, contractual agreement. Anything else is irrational.
If you wanted a specific background for the development team and not just the architect, that should have been specified in the agreement.
The new "corporation is a legal person" doctrine, which the Union got along very well without for nearly 200 years
The "corporation is a legal person" doctrine predates the United States; its pretty much the purpose of having corporations as distinct from individuals doing business as individuals or partnerships. But there have generally been distinctions between the treatment of natural persons and different classes of juridical persons in many areas of the law.
The idea of corporations as persons specifically invested with Constitutional rights in their own right may be newer, but that's a special application of the idea of corporations as legal persons, not equivalent to the much older general concept.
I bet a large % of the paid developers are contributing code that is pretty useless to the home desktop user.
I dunno. With the big contributors being Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, and Oracle, I'd suspect that much of what some of them do -- particularly Red Hat and Intel and Novell -- has pretty broad impact on desktop users. (While IBM is supporting their mainframes, they do a lot of other things to, and I wouldn't be surprised if there contributions also had broad impact.)
Note also that paid contributions also include groups like the Linux Foundation and Linux distributors.
And this differs from closed source software in what way? Did you believe that developers of closed source software typically get "a piece of the action"?
The people paying them do.
No one is getting a piece of the action on Linux license sales, because there's no action to get a piece of.
Sure, businesses contributing to the kernel do get something out of it. Some of them have Linux support business, and get support contracts from people who want that sort of thing. Some of them just get a platform for apps (internal or external) that they used to run on.
There's a big difference between entities -- individuals or corporations -- using their own resources to address their own need and sharing the results with a community who is free to use, and modify, the resulting work and closed source software.
Replace "corporations" with "unions", "political parties", or "individuals". If your opinion changes, then your logic is faulty.
I disagree. One of these is not like the others. Individual rights are different from rights of entities that exist as "persons" only as a fiction of law, and granting rights equal to those of the former to the latter necessarily destroys the equal rights of individuals, since those entities are always agents for individuals, so weighing their rights equal to those of individuals necessarily gives some individual greater rights by virtue of their involvement with entities which are treated as persons.
It's funny how Walmart is equated to the devil and the destoryer of mom & pop stores yet whenever an open system or system with linux pre-installed comes out, everyone runs to point that Walmart has cheaper computers and parts.
I suspect you will find that the people doing the equating of Walmart with the Devil are not the same people pointing to them as the source of preferable alternatives.
Or, in more general terms: different people on the internet think different things.
How can you say the Open PC has more power than the Mac Mini? That Mac's 2.26ghz Core Duo runs rings around the Open PC's 1.6ghz Atom
Both are dual core, x86-64 processors; the Atom N330 supports hyperthreading, the C2D doesn't. There are probably some scenarios in which the C2D's higher frequency and other advantages don't outweigh the Atom's hyperthreading advantage and/or the OpenPC's RAM advantage (more RAM often equating to less need to hit slower disk.)
So for 190 Euro more, you get OS X, a much faster, 64-bit, virtualisation-capable CPU, and a real GPU with dual display support, but lose 1GB RAM.
Except that the OpenPC's Atom N330 is a dual core, 64-bit, processor. The C2D is faster, though. Both are capable of virtualization (virtualization predates the VT extensions), but the Atom N330 doesn't support Intel's VT extensions.
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Of course, if you RTFA, the photos of other students were all Caucasian.
So if you always said a "black guy" was a Democrat, it wouldn't have any effect on the results at all.
It has a direct effect on #1 (which was, again, that I plan not to replace the phone with another iPhone when it needs to be replaced) because it limits choice.
It doesn't have a direct effect on #2 (the fact that I don't plan to spend lots of money purchasing anything that depends on the expectation that I will continue to have an iPhone), which I stated was a direct consequence of #1, not the walled garden itself. Of course, #1 is a direct consequence of the walled garden.
Uh, the free, $1, and $2 (and even $5) apps aren't the "expensive apps" I said I wasn't going to buy. Saying "I'm not going to buy expensive apps as a result of the walled garden" isn't the same thing as saying "I'm not going to buy any iPhone apps, all of which are expensive". What I said was what I meant. Your argument against something different is, well, misdirected, at best.
Probably; the Blackberry, while less technology advanced, pretty much was a "product like the iPhone" 10 years ago.
I don't think the "personal computer" market has done that all.
The market for a number of completely new devices that sit somewhere between traditional PCs and older mobile devices that had completely fixed functionality with no third-party apps (or even first-party apps besides those pre-installed) has accepted that limited openness to developers is acceptable (and I'm not even sure that those markets have really accepted that, so much as having lacked viable, price-competitive alternatives that aren't severely disadvantaged by the tightly-controlled dominant player was well-established first and has a major pre-existing network effect advantage.)
That's kind of like saying "If floorplan of this room is a triangle, I also want it to have interior angles that total 360 degrees."
I bought an iPhone -- seemed to be the best price for features at the time I bought it -- and I like it, but I do, in fact, care about the walled garden, and its the one big negative of the phone, and the biggest reason that (1) I expect to replace it with something else, probably Android-based, when the time comes to replace it, and (2) I don't by expensive apps for the phone, as a direct consequence of #1.
Though, ironically perhaps, if good rich HTML5 apps that work on the iPhone take off, I might stay with iPhone (though I still wouldn't buy expensive native apps through the app store), so, for me at least, Google is mitigating my concerns with the walled garden rather than highlighting them.
Apple's problem is probably, I would guess, that the GVoice UI is commoditizing most of the phone-related features that are phone-functionality selling points for the iPhone.
AT&T's problem is probably the free SMS with convenient forwarding options, and the phone forwarding options and visual/web-based voice mail that provide alternatives to services for which AT&T charges fees (SMS, and airtime to access voice mail), and the fact that it provides alternative contact management and voicemail storage so that its even easier to switch phones and service providers that government-mandated portability of phone numbers makes it.
In both cases, the problems are around GV weakening lock-in to the companies respective products and services.
Has the fact that miscarriage occurs in nature silenced the people objecting to induced abortion?
Has the fact that death occurs in nature silenced the people objecting to murder?
Has the fact that group conflicts over territory occur in nature silenced the people objecting to war?
Has the fact that climate changes occur in nature silenced the people objecting to human actions which contribute to climate change?
In general "X occurs in nature" does not silence people who object to humans choosing actions which use or result in X or something very much like it.
Well, except that the mechanisms involved in horizontal gene transfer are already key tools in genetic engineering. The notionally big deal here is the idea that because of the dominance of horizontal gene transfer as a primary mechanism of gene transfer, there was a time when organism-centered evolution wasn't the primary mode of evolution, and that instead the units on which evolution operated were genes themselves. The case has been made previously (and popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene) that while organisms are convenient proxies in lots of cases, genes ought to be considered the unit on which selection works even now, and that doing so was both more practically useful and more sensible in terms of the logical coherence of the model than using the organism as the fundamental unit on which evolution works.
In any case, it may be a mistake to contrast this with "Darwinian evolution" particularly in the "modern sense", since Darwinian evolution is recognized as a general process which applies when certain factors are present, no matter what the unit on which it works happens to be (and this generality is important to its applications in machine learning and is at the heart of the concept of memetics.)
A non-technical end user will often be happier with a maximally streamlined configuration process, and I think that's the main target of NBR. A technical user can just use base Ubuntu and customize it to their tastes.
If, like many desktops, it came with a time-limited Office Home and Student demo, which most Windows (XP Home and 7 Starter and Home Premium) netbooks also come with, and they spent the money once to buy a license for Home and Student for the desktop, when they get the netbook, they probably just have to enter the license information to activate it on the new system (Home and Student is normally licensed for up to 3 computers.)
There aren't any limits on Netbooks running Win 7. There might be for Win 7 Starter, but Win 7 Starter exists mostly to get netbook manufacturers to move off of XP -- and to sell end-users upgrades to Win 7 Home Premium once they run into the Starter limits.
This is quite obviously false; device makers continue to make laptops and other portable devices where power is a central focus, or at least one of several key focusses along with price and battery life. That's why there are notebooks using Core-series processors, and, on the lower end of the scale, netbooks using ION and the more powerful dual-core processors in the Atom line.
Device makers are also providing less-expensive, less-powerful portable devices that focus on non-power-user usage patterns that involve lots of web-browsing and light document editing, which don't require a lot of horsepower.
I would suggest that not everyone wants what you think "people want", and that the market, both in terms of what gets made and what gets sold, reflect that diversity in interests.
If its a national "collective agreement" and some schools don't use it, the agreement may still be a good deal if others do, just like a site license for software that isn't used on every machine that it could be under the terms of the license can be a good deal compared to licensing each machine individually.
Google Voice does not, in fact, call your phone with the new app, which is the change from the previous mobile web app (which used the same model as the regular, non-mobile web interface, which calls back to one of your registered phones.)
The new app gives your phone a number to call and invokes the dialer of your phone, so you make an outgoing call, but to Google Voice, not the final destination of your call. Otherwise, it works the way you describe.
Actually, no, that was the old way (and the mechanism still used by the "vanilla" Google Voice web interface you get if you aren't using an iPhone or, presumably, Android phone.) This new app actually uses the iPhone dialer to call into the GV PBX rather than calling back to the iPhone.
Google Voice isn't a VoIP service, its an SMS, voice mail, call routing and contact management service that requires an actual phone line to route voice calls to (or take them from); the only "mode of operation" that would be Touch compatible is the dial-back mode used on the basic website where placing a call has Google Voice call one of your phones to complete the call. Which I suppose might be useful if you had a touch and access to a phone that didn't have its own web connection.
Websites can't access the microphone, I don't think, but its immaterial, since Google Voice isn't a VoIP app and wouldn't have a use for the microphone.
Websites can request the phone to dial a number, which creates a pop-up window and requires active user confirmation to actually dial. It is this functionality which the Google Voice iPhone web app uses to place calls (it calls a Google Voice phone number, which is set up to route your call to the actual number you dialed via the web interface.)
Using the app UI is. Actually calling isn't like browing the web, though, as it uses the hooks Apple provides to the dialing functionality for web pages (originally, Apple focussed on web apps as the primary apps for the iPhone, and when they added native apps, they didn't remove that functionality.)
Note that you could use most of the Google Voice function from the existing mobile web app that they've had for a while, the only real change is that now, rather than using the dial-back system that the "vanilla" Google Voice web interface uses when making calls, calls dial out from your phone. And the UI is a bit prettier than the earlier web interface.
Back before the native iPhone app got stalled, there were some features you couldn't use from the "mobile" version of the web page, but it didn't take very long after the whole storm over Apple not allowing the native app for Google to add most of the functionality into the mobile web app. I think the only thing that is actually new (in terms of functionality rather than UI) in the new iPhone-targetted web app from the old generic mobile web app is access to account management features like forwarding settings, contact editing, etc. (and since the iPhone contacts have been able to sync with Google Voice's forever, you can already do the contact editing part from the iPhone's native contacts utility.)
So, you get exactly what was represented to you, no more and no less. That's what you ought to expect in any arm's-length, contractual agreement. Anything else is irrational.
If you wanted a specific background for the development team and not just the architect, that should have been specified in the agreement.
The "corporation is a legal person" doctrine predates the United States; its pretty much the purpose of having corporations as distinct from individuals doing business as individuals or partnerships. But there have generally been distinctions between the treatment of natural persons and different classes of juridical persons in many areas of the law.
The idea of corporations as persons specifically invested with Constitutional rights in their own right may be newer, but that's a special application of the idea of corporations as legal persons, not equivalent to the much older general concept.
I dunno. With the big contributors being Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, and Oracle, I'd suspect that much of what some of them do -- particularly Red Hat and Intel and Novell -- has pretty broad impact on desktop users. (While IBM is supporting their mainframes, they do a lot of other things to, and I wouldn't be surprised if there contributions also had broad impact.)
Note also that paid contributions also include groups like the Linux Foundation and Linux distributors.
The people paying them do.
No one is getting a piece of the action on Linux license sales, because there's no action to get a piece of.
Sure, businesses contributing to the kernel do get something out of it. Some of them have Linux support business, and get support contracts from people who want that sort of thing. Some of them just get a platform for apps (internal or external) that they used to run on.
There's a big difference between entities -- individuals or corporations -- using their own resources to address their own need and sharing the results with a community who is free to use, and modify, the resulting work and closed source software.
I disagree. One of these is not like the others. Individual rights are different from rights of entities that exist as "persons" only as a fiction of law, and granting rights equal to those of the former to the latter necessarily destroys the equal rights of individuals, since those entities are always agents for individuals, so weighing their rights equal to those of individuals necessarily gives some individual greater rights by virtue of their involvement with entities which are treated as persons.
I suspect you will find that the people doing the equating of Walmart with the Devil are not the same people pointing to them as the source of preferable alternatives.
Or, in more general terms: different people on the internet think different things.
Both are dual core, x86-64 processors; the Atom N330 supports hyperthreading, the C2D doesn't. There are probably some scenarios in which the C2D's higher frequency and other advantages don't outweigh the Atom's hyperthreading advantage and/or the OpenPC's RAM advantage (more RAM often equating to less need to hit slower disk.)
Except that the OpenPC's Atom N330 is a dual core, 64-bit, processor. The C2D is faster, though. Both are capable of virtualization (virtualization predates the VT extensions), but the Atom N330 doesn't support Intel's VT extensions.