redrobot5050

>So in other words it's still slow but because of vendor pressure it's been lumped into "The OS" to hide that cost from the user?

I only used it on a Mac, before I discovered plugins that did Facebook integration for iPhoto (and later, that was baked in). And on OS X, no, it was not slow. I'm assuming it would be equally fast for windows.

Also, its not so much lumping the start up cost to "the OS" so much as "The OS Starting Up". How often do people reboot their machines nowadays? Once every six months? With that in mind, it's a pretty negligible trade off.

Privacy exists. Just not on social networks where you share personal informational with the network provider.

FTA:

>> Our culture's relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them—men who are usually bigger, stronger, and (like any human) occasionally crazy. This feeling—often confirmed by actual experiences of harassment and assault—can lead, understandably, to a lifetime of low-level wariness and sense of vulnerability that men have trouble appreciating. <<

I want to comment on the attitude Randall is projecting in the above referenced quote. It's a commonplace attitude in the modern world today. That a woman's only protection is a man's forbearance. I feel this attitude is also toxic to our social fabric -- it really is just another form of gender bias. Attitudes like this lead to strange unintended consequences: Single, unmarried men cannot be seated next to unaccompanied minors on a plane. Men are now less likely to come to the aide of a screaming or crying child in public.

Just because some Vikings rape and pillage does not mean that all men do. Just because my grandfather was of German descent and fought in WWII should you assume he was a Nazi (he was a medic for the Allies).

Google+ is supposed to have privacy options "superior to facebook". (And considering they also have access to our search history and email, they had better be). Women online (and this is likely not their first social networking experience) have the same access to those privacy tools as everyone else. Let them block the harassers and those that objectify them.

(But still some really good points made about co-opting "Other").

You can already record video with your webcam and upload it directly to Facebook, just like you can with YouTube.

Yes they are talking about Java applets. However, the technology has improved (a large portion of windows users have a java quick launcher set to run on start up) and if it is anything like Facebook's original "Photo Uploader" (back before they integrated with phones and iPhoto and other apps, they had a Java app where you could browse and add photos. It would also scale/reduce quality of high megapixel photos that otherwise couldn't be uploaded to Facebook -- this was down client side through the app and was still relatively quick.) it won't be so bad.

TL;DR: Yes, it's a java applet. However, if its anything like how Facebook has done java applets in the browser, it will feel quick and lightweight on most systems.

Why do I feel like they're begging everyone to short the stock?

Um, Remote Desktop and VNC apps are on the App Store aplenty.

And there are plenty of Keyboard Docks / Bluetooth Keyboards for the iPad.

Except that Apple stores didn't come about until Apple had lost that war.

Of course, now that they lost that war, they have an awesome prize. They are the most profitable computer maker today.

>1. Phones have a specific purpose, which for most people is the ability to make phone calls, send and receive text messages and use maps. I would guess that these are the three biggest uses of smartphones (but it is only a guess).

People who buy phones with a specific purpose buy dumbphones. The average iOS user has 50 apps on them nowadays. You've narrowed the use case too much.

That's also the appeal of the Apple brand to consumers: Buy it today, who knows what else you'll be using it for tomorrow?

With iMessage, a lot of people paying AT&T for unlimited texting are going to be dropping those plans. In theory, if all your friends have iPhones and will only have iPhones, you never need to pay for a text message plan on top of your data plan.

>Tablets are a different beast. There is much less inbuilt and obvious functionality. Apple has a vision of what the use case for this. I don't think anyone else really does (yet).

They really don't, and they're not marketing tablets to consumers intelligently at all. Regular consumers don't care about Flash. Heck, that holy war is pointless even among geeks. What consumers want is an easy way to view the view on the web: be it native apps or a flash plug in. They don't care about HOW. They just care that they can' Most consumers don't see the iPad as "crippled without Flash" because something like 80% of the video on the web is accessible through Apps. (Whereas I don't believe any of the Android Tablets have Netflix).

Netflix is trying hard to replace cable for consumers. For me, a device not having a netflix tie in is a dealbreaker.

They still have ways to go.

I stand correct. My friend went to an Apple certified tech to get her laptop HD swapped with her Mac Mini HD, because they wanted more of their music on the laptop because they traveled often, and the Apple tech couldn't do it. Issue with the Mac Mini and how it makes the HD a non-user servicable part.

Get a Honda Accord V6. Basically the same weight. About 1 second slower in its 0-60 acceleration. Cheaper, better mileage and safer.

Oh well. The developer will just move it to a web app. If he was smart, he was just using the embedded app version of Safari anyway to access a web site.

Current Mac Mini's solder the cable to the drive and it's not swappable. (It's like the new iMac's drives -- which have apple specific firmware and thermal systems, but worse.)

This barrier is quickly going away as well.

Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) is virtualizable. I'm sure someone will build a rack and offer cloud-based Lion accounts for developers that can be remoted into 24/7 so long as you have internet access.

>Seems its evil for the non-unionized to make money in education

College professors are tenured, not unionized. And considering that most schools hire adjunct professors and slash benefits to the bone, it's hard to argue that teachers are bleeding the system dry.

On the other hand, the school where I just got my Master's from just built a brand new 177,000 square foot rec center, complete with 3 story climbing wall. And we've proudly paid good money to bring the guy/girl who invented Zumba to teach a few Zumba sessions. On top of this, programs that bring recognition to "joe consumer" (college football, basketball, etc) want for not.

Also, much of PBS is not unionized. It's kind of hard to unionize organizations that rely on member donations to keep afloat.

No, the metric here is Interface builder vs. the eclipse plugin for Android UI design. It's a lot harder to create an of equal or superior polish for Android.

There might be more Android phones out there, but you also can't get to them through the Android Market. Not every country that has Android has an App Store that will accept commercial apps. It's getting bigger and growing faster, but Apple is still ahead of Android.

Also, Apple's tools for developing are just superior. The Android SDK is an Eclipse/Netbeans Plug-in. Apple's is an 800MB-1GB version of XCode.

>If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases.

Tell that To Glen Greenwald, a journalist, who is finding that Bank of American is actively "scheming" to discredit her because of her support of WikiLeaks.

Tell that to Helen Thomas, a former White House correspondent, who criticized America's Pro-Israel stance and how it impacts on peace in the middle east.

The larger point that I'm trying to make is there are certain debates in this country that are one-sided. By that, I mean one-side controls the debate. It is not interested in honest discourse and the free exchange of ideas. It is interested in the status quo. It has found out that it is easier to discredit its critics (AIPAC has labeled most of its critics as 'anti-semetic', even if they are of Jewish Heritage.) than engage them.

In these instances, it might be easier to lay out the facts in sourced, cited, verifiable articles while remaining anonymous.

FYI: Arizona does not allow the insanity defense in capital crimes. If he's mentally fit to stand trial, he faces the death penalty.

I would have thought iDevices used BSD, since the whole Mach-kernel architecture is BSD based and all iDevices claim to run a Mach-kernel derived OS.

(I am aware there was MkLinux, which was also mach kernel powered, but it had very bloated performance compared to linux.)

Right, and how many Windows NT apps were there for MIPS and PPC? If Developers still have too much trouble creating "universal" apps, your port is effectively dead. Outside of x86 and Alpha, NT was never used.

(Off topic anecdote)

A friend of mine has a father who had a file on him by the Stasi. In it they had a "scent sample". Someone had broken into his bedroom and stolen a piece of linen that he had slept on while he was in the shower one day. It's crazy to think that someone had/has the job of collecting "scent samples". And what a government would need that for, really.

< /anecdote>

How is WP7 better than iOS 1.0? It seems about feature even with iOS 1.0.

Nevermind that WP7 isn't competing against iOS 1.0. It's competing against iOS 4.3, and in the fall, iOS 5.0.

Can you provide a source for the video games fact you quote? I would think that most games license engines/SDKs that already support/license MP3 and its included in their upfront toolchain cost, meaning they pay for it whether or not they use it.

Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right?

Portability was one of the first things Microsoft sacrificed to get things "working right".

And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.

Renounce your citizenship for something other than to avoid taxation. Like, you're suddenly in love with socialized medicine. Or to "protest the war" or "America's imperialism". Just don't mention taxes in your "exit interview" and there you go.

No, that's incorrect. Yes, the US is one of the few governments that will tax you for income earned outside of the united states or while living aboard as a US citizen, but if you renounce your citizenship, you're off the hook for taxes. You need to file a tax return and declare income, but you don't pay taxes.

Hardware engineering can easily be 12 months out of 18. There are a sundry of reasons:

a) Moore's law. The technology your school is using for hardware design is easily 5-6 or 10 years out of date. This makes it easier to teach and cheaper to work on, but the "real world issues" like heat, leakage current, etc just aren't addressed at the same level.

b) Intel has its own RTL that is not taught in schools. Some technology companies also have proprietary in-house technologies (like Cachet, or Wasabi).

c) Ripple effects. Analog components might change/fluctuate and this impacts the entire design. Or a new antenna placement might merit new design, etc.

d) Scale. An undergrad in hardware engineering typically builds a 5 stage pipeline processor that supports 2-4 hardware interrupts and a memory controller. This is enough to run linux on an FPGA. You've engineered a computer! But a Core 2 Duo has 23 pipeline stages. Vector units. Out of Order execution. 96% accurate branch predictor. Each one of those things I've mentioned could be the focus of a masters or PhD thesis. Getting hired, you'd be expected to pick up the logic of all of them in about six months.

e) Minimization. More systems are being done by less chips. This is what is called System-On-A-Chip design by some. Previously, you'd need to know how to design a CPU. Now you need to know how to integrate a CCD into the CPU.

This is off the top of my head but i'm sure you get the point.

That 1% still covers:

Access to the device's GPS. Access to the devices Accelerometer. Hardware Accelerated 3d Graphics (Although this is possible with WebGL, I would wager the tools are more focused towards native clients) Access to the device's Camera / Film Roll

Yes, you are. Fortunately, Wiki backed my understanding of the situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_Machine#Military_Enigma

In short, the Navy, specifically U boats, used a non-standard, stronger crypto (in this, more rotors) Enigma machine, called M4. They formed their own Enigma network called "Triton" which the allies called "Shark".

Due to their hardening, and less message sent for traffic analysis, these machines were "safer" against cryptanalysis.