itsdapead wrote:

I think that one fails Hanlon's Razor.

Don't you mean Hanlon's RAZR? (or, maybe, Hanlon's ROKR?)

Experts who claim that prices will continue to rise when prices have been rising, or continue to fall when prices have been falling, are nothing but weather vanes. These are the same idiots who have denied that we were in the last half dozen bubbles; the same idiots who were excited about DOW 30,000; the same idiots who claimed that stock/housing prices could just keep going up and up FOREVER!

I tend to agree with John Gruber of Daring Fireball that all of these rumors of larger screen iPhones are just bullshit, except for one detail: a larger screen would mean a larger phone body, which would allow for a larger battery, and would give even longer battery life. Battery life is the name of the game in mobile devices, and the larger display would give Apple an opportunity to get an additional leg up on their competition. It would also be helpful to have more battery capacity if they were upgrading the iPhone to 4G, which seems to need a lot more power.

While I tend to find Gruber's arguments about maintaining the dimensions of the UI by maintaining the dimensions and resolution of the display convincing, the change in dimensions of the iPhone interface going from a 3.5" to a 4" screen doesn't seem to be much of a concern. The greater concern is that the 4" screen is too large for many people to comfortably access the full screen with their thumb while holding the phone in the same hand (though that could be alleviated by narrowing the bezel around the screen).

So, while I'd love to bet against the rumor mongers clamoring for a 4" display on the next iPhone, I think that it might actually happen. A 4G phone will need a bigger battery, and I think Apple would rather make the phone face larger, than make the phone thicker, and that make a 4" display an easy sell.

I can say, with some authority, that Linux succeeded on it's own merit, mostly because it supported a broad range of commodity hardware. It got a boost because everyone started buying 386s, which were the first competent hardware for the IBM PC. There were lots of options back in the late eighties, all vying for some kind of position, but most of them had big problems of community: Coherent, MINIX, xinu, Xenix, Apple A/UX, netBSD, OS/2, OS-9, QNX, Lynx, etc. I looked at all of them as reasonable alternatives to the laughable PC operating systems of the day (MS-DOS and Macintosh System 7). NetBSD was a reasonable competitor right up through the mid-nineties, but Linux hardware support eventually blew it out of the water. By 1995 it was clear that Linux and the open source development methodology had won handily.

Yes, licensing had something to do with all of this, but so did Linus' management style: people wanted to work on Linux, and Linus did not turn them away: he welcomed them. I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Dr. Tanenbaum, I have the greatest respect for him and his work, but other than netBSD, none of the other free and open OSs of the day were making any attempt to take the general market, MINIX included. I remember looking at MINIX and rejecting it because of it's limitation to academic use (the limitation to the 286 wasn't that much of a concern, though it probably should have been).

Contracts made with your dead father a null and void at his death. The folks dealing with him through eBay are just out of luck. If they are nice to you, maybe you should consider helping them out, but that's all you're own good will, legally they have no claims (or, maybe they do have claims, and they can take them up with the executor of your father's estate, and will have to get in line, assuming that there's any estate to claim against). The banks should respond more rapidly, but will require a death certificate. Once you have shown them the death certificate, they should be able to shut down the automated bill pays, and maybe even claw back some of the payments that went out after the date of death.

As for making this stuff easier on your own survivors: I'll second the safe deposit box idea. Just put a list of your passwords in the safe deposit box. It's a bit of a pain to keep it up to date, but not too bad. I just keep a list of passwords in my desk, and my survivors have been told about it. I only tell the folks that I can actually trust, so there's no question of anyone impersonating me (or, no question worth fretting over). Keeping that list in a safe deposit box would offer 1) better security (burglars wouldn't find it, for example), and 2) also protects the list from being destroyed in a house fire. (Man! I gotta go get a safe deposit box!)

At least the first part, before we get to barricades in the streets, tumbrils and public beheadings.

Bullshit. And unsupported bullshit to boot.

I bought an iPhone so that I could read and send e-mail on the go, which gave me an edge keeping in contact with my boss and our clients. I bought the bottom of the line 3Gs, less than a year before the release of the 4G, so there was damn little "cool" or "status" involved. Similarly, I bought an iPad (version 1) only a month ago (again, no "cool" or "status" in owning the obsolete older model) because I could build spreadsheets (Numbers), write documents (Pages and PlainText), draw diagrams (iDraw), read and write e-mails (Mail), and connect to our production servers (Prompt, iSSH and ezDesktop, all over a Cisco VPN. which is supported natively by iOS) from a device that weighs a fraction of what my laptop weighs, whose battery last two or three times as long as the laptop's battery, and which cost half what my work laptop cost.

Just spouting off your prejudices doesn't make you right, no matter how many times you repeat yourself. The idea that "open" is a winning strategy in the tablet market is belied by simple observation: the dominant platform in the tablet market, by a factor of at least 10 to 1, is NOT an open platform. The people spending the money obviously don't care about "open" and to assume, as you obviously do, that this is evidence of the buying public's stupidity just brands you as arrogant and elitist. I would say that it's a damn good thing that you are not running one of the companies trying to make and sell tablets, but it seems that most of the companies in the market display the same kind of contempt for their prospective customers as you do, so it wouldn't much matter.

welcome to the nation's capital?

digitalchinky asked:

What exactly does "This." mean? (It seems redundant)

in reference to CJSpil's reply

This. For a living I do support and spend most of my time speaking to people who really shouldn't have been granted admin privileges on anything more complicated than an etch-a-sketch.

to biodata's original question:

What will be the effect of organisations outsourcing everything and not employing engineers?

It seems to be an abbreviation of the the phrase "it means this."

No one cares about tablets, except 15 million hipsters and journalists.

FTFY

take the word of one who has procreated: even the nipple is not an intuitive interface. A shocking large number of newborns (including my own daughter) need to be trained to nurse!

Yeah, it shocked me too.

Is professional success or fame the definition of a "good" adult?

just sayin'.

then your wait is over

You are welcome. Have a nice day.

congressional investigations don't have to adhere to the same rules of evidence that apply in a court of law, so "inadmissibility" isn't a concern here.

um, that's between $150,000 and $215,000 a year, depending on if we are talking about only working days or not. While that's not CEO-money, it's nothing to sneeze at (it puts you in the top 20% of households in the U.S.A.). I'd say that would be worth my time, and the time of just about everyone that I know, assuming that you could pull it off in no more than 40 hours per week.