The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway. (Bernard Avishai)

with incandescents — the ive found the colour spectrum left me with the 'blues' — it was only when halogens came on the scene, that i felt that we finally had a bulb that got us closer to a natural sunshine daylight full spectrum bulb. then came compact flourescents —those toxic (mercury) abonitations made poor lighting quality manditory. thank god LEDs came in just in time to forstall the takeover of the CFLs.

consumers should be given a choice — halogen bulbs still have the best colour spectrum imo.
why should we be banned from having good colour quality bulbs!? tax them, or whatever if the
reason is because of the energy efficiency — but it is not because the quality of the lighting is better.

people forget that in the world before the app store — you had to setup your own website, and promotion, and micro-payment transaction processing system. these were often onerous for small software developers who were at a significant disadvantage when trying to sell software online.

the app store gave you distribution — and micropayment transaction processing (that you could not obtain, since the credit card companies didnt want to deal with you unless you did a minimum of $30,000 in sales — which did not occur for most software developers.

geez. go back to the old system, and see how well you do.

it has taken a free OS upgrade more than 2 years to match win7 marketshare. hmm..

this is the same thing they said about MOTORS — that they would save us from having to do all the labour and free us for other things — what actually happened is that they made us work just as long — with 10x the horsepower coming from machinery to leverage the higher profits made possible by the machinery.

how about a ban on tweeting while at work!?

macbook — because you can run all three: i) macOS, ii) linux, and iii) windows — the hardware will boot all three natively. also — you get to run UNIX + have adobe and microsoft office at the same time — no need to install cygwin.

the combo of being able to boot every OS + native unix + adobe and microsoft apps — and decent hardware specs that take a beating makes the macbook pro a great machine — they stand up to abuse and keep on ticking, and are beautifully designed.

i just upgraded from a 2009 macbook pro to a 2016 macbook pro — they boosted the speed of the processor, went retina, and went with all usbC ports — yet, im still running the same monitor and usb hub + audio interface — the cables changed with usbC, but the hardware and peripherals didnt, so its not as big a deal as some make it. best machine ever made.

2cents from toronto island,
jp

i think most people are expected to buy the iphone 8 - but some people may needthe processing pawer of a macbook pro in their phone (with the pro app support in iOS) - in their phone. professional photgraphers and musicians may need a notebook processor in their phone - now they can have one.

for the rest of ya peasants, get back to the iphone 8, cause the X aint for you.

probably about the same as what happens when a plane fails.

2cents
j

the touchbar uses an extra monitor driven by the graphics card to provide the seamless extensibility that it does — so i dont think you could easily add something like that to any old USB keyboard — because you would also need the support of a graphics card to do so.

it is only possible on the macbooks because the graphics card is already rolled in to the same package as where the touchbar is.

2cents from toronto island
john p

i've recently converted from C++ to Swift — better modern native unicode string handling, and scales really well from beginner semantics all the way to system level stuff. its a great language to work in — and written by chris lattner (who wrote the clang and LLVM compiler/architecture) — so its well fitted for performance optimizations/very fast.

swift is the first language that i'd say i feel comfortable replacing C++ with.

2cents from toronto
john p

anyone that's going to dig in to Dennett's explanation of consciousness should also consider two epistemological works by rudolf steiner:

The Philosophy of Freedom - Some results of introspective observation following the methods of Natural Science:

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/...

and

The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/...

The C Programming Language - Kernighan and Ritchie: http://www.cprogramming.com/bo...

Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/2981...

and good design - simple is hard, and theyve worked really hard to make something that is perhaps more beautiful than it needs to be, but in a way that every functional component is at once also aesthetic - they have done to the computer what mies van der rohe did for buildings and architecture.

some people appreciate that care and attention to detail - carrying through the consequences of simplification even into every component - so that all the parts work well together by design. for some, that can be extremely satisfying. to use a product for a while, and then stumble on a feature where you go, 'wow.. they thought of that too..!' - you can feel the passion that went into the denign of the product, and its meticulous execution.

oto, could care less, they live more mundane lives, technology devoid of art.

2cents from toronto island
john p

yes!