The iPhone has been dominating Apple's software development strategy for quite a while now. After all, Apple did delay the release of Leopard for several months because they had shifted resources to the iPhone, and both Leopard and Snow Leopard are bringing APIs to the desktop from the iPhone OS. When you consider that Snow Leopard is going further than any other Mac OS X release to kill Carbon (esp. the Finder), it becomes clear that Apple really wants a homogeneous developer environment across all their devices.
People will work around the "free means free" policy easily enough, by selling their ebook readers for $5 but allowing one free download, and by putting ads in the "Lite" version of their apps for the expensive full version.
Assuming the discharge rate scales linearly with the volume of the battery, a 5 mL cell (roughly the size of a AA alkaline cell) could dump power at a rate of 125 Watts continuously. That's more than enough to illuminate a room with a halogen bulb. It's also enough to melt the glass around a typical flash bulb. The time taken to completely drain the cell is irrelevant, because it's instantaneous power discharge rate is sufficient for photography purposes.
Right. They discharge very quickly. But then they have to recharge for what's typically several seconds in consumer models before they're ready to fire again. These batteries could eliminate the capacitor and the associated delay. If these electrodes become cheap to manufacture, it's quite reasonable to expect them to become common in cameras precisely because they eliminate an extra component and improve performance.
There's not much reason for Fox to go out of their way to make their shows available to those outside the USA when their advertisers are only targeting the USA.
No. Power users are the ones who worry about that 2% even when they already have a pair of 24" monitors. That's what makes them power users: they want to get the most out of whatever computer they have.
The wording is substantially different from the second amendment.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Compare with:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Tho copyright clause gives congress the power to promote the progress of "science and the useful arts", within limits. The second amendment explains why it prohibits congress from infringing on a right of the people.
The supreme court has at times stated that copyright and patent law cannot be used where they would hinder progress. Clearly, much of the current judiciary likes to pretend the wording is more like that of the second amendment.
The US Constitution already makes it explicit that the purpose of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and any other intellectual property law is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". All it takes is a judge to rule that a law making DRM enforceable is hindering scientific progress (or not time limited), and the law is unconstitutional, thus freeing people to circumvent DRM as appropriate.
I get the feeling that if Nvidia produces an x86 chip, it will be to compete with Larrabee, and not intended to be used as the CPU for a PC. That means that your comments about PCI address space and operating-system imposed limits on per-process address space wouldn't apply, and 4GB of total memory would probably be enough. (Have you seen any graphics cards go past 4GB yet?)
The real reason that Nvidia wouldn't implement a 386 class processor is that the instruction set architecture is crazy and stupid. The lack of general purpose registers really limits the performance that can be achieved without tricks like our-of-order execution. Nvidia would have to implement x86-64 and SSE stuff in order to give compilers some room to optimize code.
Wouldn't metrics like the Erdos number suffice? Calculate the weighted distance from known experts, such as Nobel laureates, Fields medalists, etc. It isn't that hard to notice a clique that is only weakly connected to the larger network.
While we're resurrecting old text mode utilities, can we get a modern Magellan clone? None of the search front-ends to stuff like Spotlight or Beagle that I've tried come close to being as cool as Magellan was.
By the way, does Magellan still work on Windows? The last time I tried was probably on XP SP1.
The Volt has been used as a unit for more a century, and it precisely defined by the SI. It also has the benefit of having a convenient magnitude for dealing with potentials that arise from common chemical reactions. That convenience isn't going to change, so there's no incentive to switch to a new unit. Odds are that as long as there are human chemists on earth, there will be somebody who uses or at least knows what a Volt is. Similarly for something like a sine wave. The only way the nomenclature for trigonometry is going to change in the next few centuries is if we're enslaved by aliens or something equally catastrophic. Basic mathematical patterns inherent in Euclidean geometry aren't going to be easily forgotten or abandoned.
Microsoft shipping a PDF viewer wouldn't be that problematic. Adobe gives away their PDF viewer, so they couldn't claim any lost profits or price fixing due to Microsoft. On the other hand, any PDF reader that Microsoft ships wouldn't support all of Adobe's fancy features unless Microsoft licensed them from Adobe, so there would still be reason for some people to get Adobe's software. The only significant damage to Adobe would be that their name wouldn't show up on as many computers.
However, it's really unlikely that Microsoft would ship a PDF reader, as it would pretty much have to comply with an existing open ISO standard that Microsoft has little influence over. Microsoft would rather try (hopelessly) to supplant PDF with a proprietary format that they control. Bundling a PDF reader with Windows would be a tacit admission that even Microsoft is subject to the pressures of the market, and that's something they can't swallow right now.
It's true that Apple Inc. as a corporation has no obligation to disclose details of the CEO's health, as the corporation doesn't really even have the right to know those details. But when Apple does disclose some details, it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether they're being selective in the details they release, and if so, why.
OS X 10.5 is derived from the Public Beta in a series of incremental releases that were, with one exception, overpriced. None of the updates to OS X has come with new features that are worth the $130 that Apple charges, though at least Apple hasn't billed any of them as an all-new rewrite of the previous version. On the other hand, many users (particularly converts from Windows) may feel that the performance increases found in new releases of OS X are worth paying significant money for. (I personally feel that that attitude can only come from unreasonably low expectations for software "upgrades".)
Hmmm... NT 5.0 to NT 5.1. Most people call that a minor version number change. XP added eye candy a bad DOS/Win9x compatibility layer, and product activation. Beyond that, the only XP software that couldn't be trivially back-ported to 2000 was stuff that depended on libraries that Microsoft restricted to XP for purely business reasons, rather than technical reasons. XP essentially was a service pack (plus a theme pack) that Microsoft got away with charging money for.
I'm not sure about you, but I think government running a trillion dollar deficit, bailing out businesses/people left and right is hardly limited.
Would you prefer a completely unregulated economy? Let me tell you, that didn't work out so well last time we tried. And more recent history has shown that half-assed fiscal policy isn't much better than none at all. So, what's wrong with the idea of the government trying to provide some economic stability? It would certainly seem to fit into the commerce clause much more easily than most of the things done in the name of regulating interstate commerce.
If you're doing IT for people who's job descriptions require basic computer skills, it's perfectly okay to tell them to suck it up when they have to transition away from software that is one week shy of a decade old, particularly if you offer some training classes.
Besides, when has it ever made sense to pamper employees who's skills are ten years out of date?
Slashdot Mirror
The iPhone has been dominating Apple's software development strategy for quite a while now. After all, Apple did delay the release of Leopard for several months because they had shifted resources to the iPhone, and both Leopard and Snow Leopard are bringing APIs to the desktop from the iPhone OS. When you consider that Snow Leopard is going further than any other Mac OS X release to kill Carbon (esp. the Finder), it becomes clear that Apple really wants a homogeneous developer environment across all their devices.
People will work around the "free means free" policy easily enough, by selling their ebook readers for $5 but allowing one free download, and by putting ads in the "Lite" version of their apps for the expensive full version.
Assuming the discharge rate scales linearly with the volume of the battery, a 5 mL cell (roughly the size of a AA alkaline cell) could dump power at a rate of 125 Watts continuously. That's more than enough to illuminate a room with a halogen bulb. It's also enough to melt the glass around a typical flash bulb. The time taken to completely drain the cell is irrelevant, because it's instantaneous power discharge rate is sufficient for photography purposes.
Right. They discharge very quickly. But then they have to recharge for what's typically several seconds in consumer models before they're ready to fire again. These batteries could eliminate the capacitor and the associated delay. If these electrodes become cheap to manufacture, it's quite reasonable to expect them to become common in cameras precisely because they eliminate an extra component and improve performance.
Camera flash, with no recharge time?
There's not much reason for Fox to go out of their way to make their shows available to those outside the USA when their advertisers are only targeting the USA.
Right. It's a fundamental constant of physics that practical fusion power is 30 years away, regardless of the current date.
It's also far from cheap.
What's the risk? That google might start charging for the service?
No. Power users are the ones who worry about that 2% even when they already have a pair of 24" monitors. That's what makes them power users: they want to get the most out of whatever computer they have.
The wording is substantially different from the second amendment.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Compare with:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Tho copyright clause gives congress the power to promote the progress of "science and the useful arts", within limits. The second amendment explains why it prohibits congress from infringing on a right of the people.
The supreme court has at times stated that copyright and patent law cannot be used where they would hinder progress. Clearly, much of the current judiciary likes to pretend the wording is more like that of the second amendment.
The US Constitution already makes it explicit that the purpose of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and any other intellectual property law is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". All it takes is a judge to rule that a law making DRM enforceable is hindering scientific progress (or not time limited), and the law is unconstitutional, thus freeing people to circumvent DRM as appropriate.
I get the feeling that if Nvidia produces an x86 chip, it will be to compete with Larrabee, and not intended to be used as the CPU for a PC. That means that your comments about PCI address space and operating-system imposed limits on per-process address space wouldn't apply, and 4GB of total memory would probably be enough. (Have you seen any graphics cards go past 4GB yet?)
The real reason that Nvidia wouldn't implement a 386 class processor is that the instruction set architecture is crazy and stupid. The lack of general purpose registers really limits the performance that can be achieved without tricks like our-of-order execution. Nvidia would have to implement x86-64 and SSE stuff in order to give compilers some room to optimize code.
I'm pretty sure they sell more ARM chips than Intel chips these days, and probably with much higher margins.
Wouldn't metrics like the Erdos number suffice? Calculate the weighted distance from known experts, such as Nobel laureates, Fields medalists, etc. It isn't that hard to notice a clique that is only weakly connected to the larger network.
Thus marking the first time Slashdot has posted a breaking news story. ;)
It's not that surprising, is it? I mean, Ray Beckerman does have the root password to slashdot, doesn't he?
While we're resurrecting old text mode utilities, can we get a modern Magellan clone? None of the search front-ends to stuff like Spotlight or Beagle that I've tried come close to being as cool as Magellan was.
By the way, does Magellan still work on Windows? The last time I tried was probably on XP SP1.
The Volt has been used as a unit for more a century, and it precisely defined by the SI. It also has the benefit of having a convenient magnitude for dealing with potentials that arise from common chemical reactions. That convenience isn't going to change, so there's no incentive to switch to a new unit. Odds are that as long as there are human chemists on earth, there will be somebody who uses or at least knows what a Volt is. Similarly for something like a sine wave. The only way the nomenclature for trigonometry is going to change in the next few centuries is if we're enslaved by aliens or something equally catastrophic. Basic mathematical patterns inherent in Euclidean geometry aren't going to be easily forgotten or abandoned.
Microsoft shipping a PDF viewer wouldn't be that problematic. Adobe gives away their PDF viewer, so they couldn't claim any lost profits or price fixing due to Microsoft. On the other hand, any PDF reader that Microsoft ships wouldn't support all of Adobe's fancy features unless Microsoft licensed them from Adobe, so there would still be reason for some people to get Adobe's software. The only significant damage to Adobe would be that their name wouldn't show up on as many computers.
However, it's really unlikely that Microsoft would ship a PDF reader, as it would pretty much have to comply with an existing open ISO standard that Microsoft has little influence over. Microsoft would rather try (hopelessly) to supplant PDF with a proprietary format that they control. Bundling a PDF reader with Windows would be a tacit admission that even Microsoft is subject to the pressures of the market, and that's something they can't swallow right now.
It's true that Apple Inc. as a corporation has no obligation to disclose details of the CEO's health, as the corporation doesn't really even have the right to know those details. But when Apple does disclose some details, it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether they're being selective in the details they release, and if so, why.
OS X 10.5 is derived from the Public Beta in a series of incremental releases that were, with one exception, overpriced. None of the updates to OS X has come with new features that are worth the $130 that Apple charges, though at least Apple hasn't billed any of them as an all-new rewrite of the previous version. On the other hand, many users (particularly converts from Windows) may feel that the performance increases found in new releases of OS X are worth paying significant money for. (I personally feel that that attitude can only come from unreasonably low expectations for software "upgrades".)
Hmmm... NT 5.0 to NT 5.1. Most people call that a minor version number change. XP added eye candy a bad DOS/Win9x compatibility layer, and product activation. Beyond that, the only XP software that couldn't be trivially back-ported to 2000 was stuff that depended on libraries that Microsoft restricted to XP for purely business reasons, rather than technical reasons. XP essentially was a service pack (plus a theme pack) that Microsoft got away with charging money for.
I'm not sure about you, but I think government running a trillion dollar deficit, bailing out businesses/people left and right is hardly limited.
Would you prefer a completely unregulated economy? Let me tell you, that didn't work out so well last time we tried. And more recent history has shown that half-assed fiscal policy isn't much better than none at all. So, what's wrong with the idea of the government trying to provide some economic stability? It would certainly seem to fit into the commerce clause much more easily than most of the things done in the name of regulating interstate commerce.
Office 2000 was released 27 Jan 1999. In one week, it will be a full decade old.
If you're doing IT for people who's job descriptions require basic computer skills, it's perfectly okay to tell them to suck it up when they have to transition away from software that is one week shy of a decade old, particularly if you offer some training classes.
Besides, when has it ever made sense to pamper employees who's skills are ten years out of date?