The author of the linked study appears not to have considered that a universe more dense with galaxies would be a universe with many more planet-sterilizing gamma ray bursts, which would not be terribly conducive to life.
You were not running a modern Mac OS X desktop with millions of colors @ 1200 x 800 (or larger) resolution and antialiasing, doing animated GUI transitions over a 14.4 kbps modem in the 90s.
My question is always this: "What does Apple have to win by locking down OS X the way they locked down iOS?". Even a single good argument would surprise me. The only thing people can come up with is 'make more money by selling applications through the Apps store'. Meanwhile Apple barely breaks even on the iOS app store, while they make billions selling hardware and selling music (DRM free, by the way). Somehow it doesn't really make sense introducing reasons for people not to buy Apple hardware, such as restricting what they can install on it.
People made the same argument you're making about dumping Classic (i.e., dumping Classic effectively restricts what can be installed on a Mac OS X machine), but Apple did it anyway. They did it to force user base migration to the new technology (i.e., Mac OS X).
Apple wants to move most or all of its user base to a unified OS that is more like iOS than Mac OS X. We know this because of what Apple themselves have called "Back to the Mac," i.e., bringing features of iOS, such as full screen apps, a home screen like the iOS home screen with app buttons, and an App Store to the next version of Mac OS X (a.k.a. Lion).
Why do they want to do this?
Because over the past decade, Mac OS X product revenue has gone from 90+% of Apple's revenue to less than 30%, and Apple sees this trend continuing. Like it or not, iOS is now the dominant Apple platform, not Mac OS X, and Apple would like to move as many customers as possible to iOS. They'll transition them by making Mac OS X more like iOS, then they'll unify iOS and Mac OS X. Most customers will buy iPads or variations thereof; others will buy iBooks running iOS not Mac OS X; only a few dinosaurs and developers will continue to run Mac OS X.
The Mac App Store is not a plot to take over the Mac software market, though it will be a small profit center for Apple. The Mac App Store is part of a long term plan to accustom Mac OS X users to using iOS, because in the future, they will mostly be iOS users, not Mac OS X users.
I know someone who use photoshop for resizing and cropping pictures, yes literally just resizing pictures, nothing fancy whatsoever... He won't even consider using any of the many free programs that would do the job, and his reason was "they're not professional", so instead he uses a pirated photoshop.
1. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
2. The core of Adobe's professional market is not composed of people as dopey as your friend. It is composed of people who make a living using Adobe's software. For these people, the many free/low-cost image editors just don't cut it - most likely because the vast majority of them do image manipulation significantly more complex than simply cropping images (who'd have thought?!).
3. If there existed a professional quality image editing suite fully feature equivalent with Photoshop but half or a quarter the price, don't you think professionals who do this sort of thing 8 hours a day, 200+ days a year for a living might have heard about it and already be using it?
Apple sells premium products to the premium market. By definition, the third world is not a premium mass market.
A premium vendor can ABSOLUTELY be a game changer, as Apple have been for decades. They change the game by redefining what is cutting edge, then the economy vendors imitate that and it eventually becomes mass market.
Just the opposite. Human children believe everything they are told - it's the only way they can get up to speed on 200000 or more years of accumulated culture. The fact that children will believe whatever they're told accounts for silly childhood beliefs like the tooth fairy, santa claus and the easter bunny.
Only mature adult humans scrutinize what they are told and test it against observable evidence. Science is the adult cognitive activity par excellence.
Fundamentalists and others who believe goofy shit without evidence are, in fact, still cognitively children.
Science could not possibly be a neotenous trait since it is children who believe whatever goofy crap they're told and adults who put their knowledge to empirical test.
No, he was not. This change will actually *slow* tasks of lower priority so it is *not* a speedup. In the example given by your parent and the videos from TFA, the compile will actually take *longer* because more cpu resources are being given to the video playback. A compile job taking *longer* is not a speedup.
However, from the user perspective, the video will play more smoothly and since you were watching Big Buck Bunny to kill time while the compile was happening, you likely won't notice or care that the compile took x% longer than it would have under the existing kernel.
GOO was already taken - it's a lisp dialect by Jonathan Bachrach of MIT. "GOO" is an acronym for "Generic Object Orientator."
Bachrach was one of the people working on Dylan, and people in language and compiler development circles (such as the creators of Google Go) would likely have known about his work (or at least know how to google "goo language" and discover that the name was already in use for a computer language).
Planes fly from Hawaii to all over the US *every day*. Why is this the only time that one has gotten mistaken for a missile?
Common Lisp, which is what the book uses, has the first ANSI standard OO programming system, CLOS - short for the "Common Lisp Object System" - which includes multiple inheritance, generic functions, a meta-object protocol, and is in all essentials, a superset of the capabilities of the object systems of mainstream OO languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk and Objective-C.
No one is advocating entering a time warp to the 1960s to use LISP 1.5 for the teaching of modern OO programming, least of all Conrad Barski, the author of Land of Lisp, which uses ANSI standard Common Lisp.
Perhaps it speaks to management's desire to treat programmers like assembly line labor inputs - unskilled and easily replaceable. This approach will always lead to lower quality software, and/or project budget overruns and/or schedule slips, and/or outright project failures.
Programmers are not unskilled labor. Since management insists on treating them as such, management settles on tools that can be mastered by the least skilled programmers. Since that's what the market wants, most schools teach to that low-ball target (i.e., university education in computer science becomes mere java vocational training).
Those wise enough to understand that programmers are highly skilled labor know that they should get out of the way and let the experts choose their own tools. When that happens, such enlightened organizations will frequently choose languages other than C, C++, C#, and Java. They'll sometimes even use languages such as common lisp as ITA software does for its QPX system which powers most of the online travel search business, such as Orbitz, Bing Travel, many large arilines, etc. and which is why Google is trying to acquire ITA...
Seriously, they couldn't find a spot for a commodity 1.8" ssd (~ $550 for 256 GB on newegg)?
Not and keep it the thickness and weight it is with the battery life it has. By not going with an ssd enclosure they save a significant amount of space which allows for more than half of the total volume to be integrated batteries.
life within a prison, even if it is invisible to the prisoner, is absurd.
Life is absurd. No need to drag prison into it.
Half of all mac purchasers are current mac owners (steve said precisely this in the keynote today). This means that moving to an App Store only system will render the existing software, and probably a whole lot of the data that software generated, useless to half of all potential new mac buyers.
Apple are not going to piss off half of their potential buyers by requiring them to buy all new software and do massive data migration just because they buy a new mac.
This is not denial. It is simple economic common sense. Your paranoia is much like the oft repeated "insight" that apple should license Mac OS to other hardware vendors. The argument against both that old chestnut and the current claims that "t3h l0ckd0wn iz c0ming6!!!" is precisely the same: Apple is a for-profit corporation, and they aren't going to piss away half of future Mac sales simply to enforce software lockdown.
What Steve expects will happen is that users will choose to buy an iOS device instead. When he says that touch devices are the future and the PC is dead, he anticipates that most users will find that they can do what they need to do on an iPad or equivalent. Pro and power users will continue to buy full fledged UNIX Mac OS X devices, replete with the ability to install software any way they like. It's just that this portion of the overall market is going to shrink progressively going forward.
Like Steve said in an interview a while back: general purpose PCs are like trucks; trucks will always be with us; we need them to deliver goods, etc.; it's just that the overwhelming majority of people drive cars, not trucks. Steve expects that in the future, the overwhelming majority of users will use iOS devices, not general purpose PCs.
iOS is not a registered UNIX product
(unlike Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6).
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
