Part of the issue is having the necessary corporate leverage. In an ideal world software would be free, but in the real world people will need Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, possibly proprietary video editing and audio software. If you took away all of these from OS X, it wouldn't be nearly as attractive a platform. If Ubuntu were suddenly able to natively run the industry-standard packages then it would probably take off rapidly. There are free/open equivalents for many things, but the reality is that when people are heavily invested in a certain way of working, they want the software they're used to. Apple had enough clout when they launched OS X (and also had Classic mode) to make sure that the OS would be a success.
I'd love to know in what ways OS X is less configurable than Windows? I can see that Linux wins hands down in the tweakability front (which is also a weakness - imagine setting up a tech support team for a third-party application to cover all flavours of Linux). Granted, I don't know much about Windows 7, but I've used all prior versions of Windows and I can't see where it beats OS X in configurability. OS X also wins hands down in scripting support - AppleScript is great and really powerful.
I think people would get over that. Many high-end (piston engine) cars now automatically turn the engine off if it idles for more than a few seconds - it's quite suprising the first time the starter motor engages when you go to pull away at a stop light.
You're crazy if you think it's worthwhile building the PCs yourself. You can easily find an off-the-shelf PC for considerably less than $1000, probably less than $500, and unless you have a team of at least 6 people sitting around with nothing better to do then you won't save money building them yourself, and you'll just cause yourself a massive headache. Simply commissioning 100 pre-built PCs (presuming you're planning to replace 10% of them at a time) is plenty of work for a support dept., even if you're not making massive software changes.
This is a stupid as is was back in the dialup days. I remember being with an ISP at our office, where they put a cap on the amount of time you could stay connected. So I had a script on our NAT box that would redial after 30 seconds when the line was dropped. Always-on Internet, just with a 30 second dropout very 6 hours. How they thought those 30 seconds would help with their bandwidth issues I never knew.
A hospital local to me had an outage a couple of years ago - someone had stolen the copper linking the back-up generators to the distribution board, there was a local planned power outage and the whole hospital went dark. Seriously low.
You don't need to do multiplication of an infinite series of digits, you just need to know how to multiply _any_ series by 10. If a = 0.999... then 10a = 9.999... Subtract a from both sides, 9a = 9, a =1. Nothing incomplete about that.
Although, you don't need any kind of algebraic proof, because it's conceptually obvious that 0.999... = 1 as a matter of definition. If you have an infinitely recurring series of 9's after the decimal point, that means as you follow the series looking for the difference between 0.999... and 1, every time you walk 'down' to the next decimal place, you find that you have to walk down again in order to discover the difference. In other words, the difference between 0.999... and 1 is infinitely small, which is 0 as a matter of definition, so therefore 0.999... must equal 1. Or, to put it another way, 0.999... is another way of writing 1, just as binary 0011 is not just numerically equal to decimal 3, but actually the same thing written down another way.
If you look at the bare spec of processor speed, RAM and number of cores, a Mac is never better. But by that measure my Ford Mondeo is no better than my friend's Audi which has the same size engine and cylinder count.
At the workstation end of the market, the Apple 'premium' is worth it for the same reason that the Dell workstation premium is worth it: superb build quality, stable PSU, proper SATA drive bays (4 of), ECC RAM which can be upgraded very easily... basically everything that makes your computer the reliable thing it needs to be if you depend on it for your everday living. If you're producing e.g. video, the cost of the machine is negligible compared to the time you save on keeping it running reliably.
For laptops, there's nothing on the market that has the convenience of Apple's two-part "unibody" design, the MagLock power supply is superb, the backlit keyboard is great. Again, there's no one killer feature, but if you use your computer on the move all the time then a MacBook Pro is hard to beat, and certainly the 'Apple tax' is a myth when you compare it to similar specced (in terms of industrial design, not just raw processor speed) machines from other manufacturers.
Most Apple hardware comes with a little book of Apple stickers. I've always presumed that's so you can stick the Apple logo on the front of your beige box PC and then install OSX on it legally.
Uh... have you used any Mac hardware? I understand that lots of people have a problem with Apple's "closed" model on the iPhone (although I'm personally quite happy with it) but I've never heard anyone claim that the hardware isn't nice. Try to find a PC laptop that's have as nice as a MacBook Pro. There are a few offerings from the likes of Sony and the top end of Dell's hardware, but really if you don't mind parting with the cash there's not much else at the top of the market.
Re:Imagine if you had to Hack Windows to run on a
on
The Hackintosh Guide
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· Score: 2, Informative
"I know of no DRM in Amiga OS..."
Then you don't know anything about Amiga OS. The OS was tied heavily to the custom chips on the motherboard, and to the Workbench ROMs, all of which were copyright owned by Commodore and normally only sold with a complete system. Even now, Amiga emulators are (in theory) illegal if you don't buy a licensed ROM image - as is the case with many emulators of very old hardware. I think most people are happy to copy now because it's so obsolete, but in the late 90s and early 2000s it was very common for the documentation for emulators of 80s and 90s hardware to suggest that you copy your own ROM image from your own machine in order to use it.
I don't know about that 10%. In the UK, during the period when Apple were only shipping pre-ordered phones, they were selling on eBay for GBP 800-1200. That's a 40-100% markup. I very nearly sold mine on, but actually needed a working phone, diary and mobile email so decided to hang on to it.
Have you actually seen an iPhone 4? It absolutely does have a raised exterior ridge, and is actually less prone to scratching than the previous designs where the thickness was greatest at the centre. AFAIK, the issue with the glass cracking/shattering seems to do with a sharp object (like a small stone) getting between the iPhone and a case, and scoring the glass just as a glass cutter does.
What you're saying cannot be correct, otherwise any international treaty between countries would be non-binding, and I'm pretty sure the UK has entered into many binding international treaties over the past couple of centuries.
I don't think you can do anything you want with content just because it's published on the web. Taking it and republishing it as your own, for example, would still be plagiarism and copyright violation, and you would still me liable.
Rubbish. Any given binary number is as likely as any other binary number of the same bit length. Finding strings of 1s and 0s of a particular length isn't a test of randomness. 0101010101010 and 111111111111 are just as likely to have been generated randomly.
Delivering into a plastic bag is standard neonatal practice in order to minimise insensible fluid loss. Ointment is not the best treatment by any means, and the plastic bag is a stopgap before getting the baby into an incubator with proper humidity control. You need to re-read the article: the baby was born at Worcestershire Royal Hospital because there wasn't time for an in-utero transfer to to Birmingham Heartlands (the tertiary centre); the baby was transferred ex-utero to Birmingham Heartlands and stayed there for 3 days, then downgraded to a less advanced unit.
The article doesn't say that doctors said they hadn't seen a baby that premature survive, the article says that mum says that the doctors said it. There's a big difference. Mums often don't take in all of the information they're given in the first few hours, and often fixate on one thing said by a junior member of staff, or even just don't understand at all. There's no way that none of the doctors in that centre had seen a 26-weeker survive. We know none of the other details - what was the cord pH? Was there a prolonged resuscitation with cardiac massage, drugs, etc.? What was the baby's progress over the first few hours? It's very common practice to paint a bleak picture for parents if the picture is bleak, and often they understand the bleakness but not the real reason. It's entirely possible that this is what has taken place.
There's a third option which you neglect: it's a stupid newspaper article full of hyperbole, from which you would be really silly to draw sweeping conclusions about the whole of neonatal care in the UK. Also, if you look on page 34 of this report, it seems like the WHO don't agree with your figures, at least for 2006.
You're grouping different categories of babies there. A few under 24 weeks survive, most neonatal units worldwide consider 24 weeks to be the threshold of viability, and would be very tentative about what to do with a baby under 24 weeks. The gestations and weights you mention are rare outliers, not common occurrences. Morbidity and Mortality are still very high in 24-26 weekers, but get better and better after that.
This newspaper article is a non-story however. It's standard practice to deliver extremely preterm babies into plastic, and it's not uncommon to have to improvise. Every hospital in the UK with a 24hr paediatric service will have paediatricians with experience resuscitating extremely preterm babies, and all should have the equipment to stabilise them for transfer to a more advanced unit.
It's not dense at all. He's tried to have the court compel a company to release information for a supposedly stolen dog that he apparently hasn't reported as stolen. And it's been two years since the dog went missing, so something isn't right here. People do need to take a little bit of personal responsibility for things rather than assuming there are lesions of people just sitting waiting to take up their cause.
No, the aim of the service is: if your dog gets lost, the animal rescue place that ends up with it can scan for a chip and then contact you. It's not the same as a GPS tracker fitted to a sports car.
No, that's not what the article says. He reported the company for not providing the information, and then tried to get police and the courts to compel the company to release the information. What he should do is report the theft and go from there. In fact, he should have reported the theft when the dog first disappeared, in which case he would have a crime reference number, all he would have to do is phone the police and quote the number, and explain that he has new information.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the issue is having the necessary corporate leverage. In an ideal world software would be free, but in the real world people will need Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, possibly proprietary video editing and audio software. If you took away all of these from OS X, it wouldn't be nearly as attractive a platform. If Ubuntu were suddenly able to natively run the industry-standard packages then it would probably take off rapidly. There are free/open equivalents for many things, but the reality is that when people are heavily invested in a certain way of working, they want the software they're used to. Apple had enough clout when they launched OS X (and also had Classic mode) to make sure that the OS would be a success.
I'd love to know in what ways OS X is less configurable than Windows? I can see that Linux wins hands down in the tweakability front (which is also a weakness - imagine setting up a tech support team for a third-party application to cover all flavours of Linux). Granted, I don't know much about Windows 7, but I've used all prior versions of Windows and I can't see where it beats OS X in configurability. OS X also wins hands down in scripting support - AppleScript is great and really powerful.
I think people would get over that. Many high-end (piston engine) cars now automatically turn the engine off if it idles for more than a few seconds - it's quite suprising the first time the starter motor engages when you go to pull away at a stop light.
You're crazy if you think it's worthwhile building the PCs yourself. You can easily find an off-the-shelf PC for considerably less than $1000, probably less than $500, and unless you have a team of at least 6 people sitting around with nothing better to do then you won't save money building them yourself, and you'll just cause yourself a massive headache. Simply commissioning 100 pre-built PCs (presuming you're planning to replace 10% of them at a time) is plenty of work for a support dept., even if you're not making massive software changes.
This is a stupid as is was back in the dialup days. I remember being with an ISP at our office, where they put a cap on the amount of time you could stay connected. So I had a script on our NAT box that would redial after 30 seconds when the line was dropped. Always-on Internet, just with a 30 second dropout very 6 hours. How they thought those 30 seconds would help with their bandwidth issues I never knew.
A hospital local to me had an outage a couple of years ago - someone had stolen the copper linking the back-up generators to the distribution board, there was a local planned power outage and the whole hospital went dark. Seriously low.
You don't need to do multiplication of an infinite series of digits, you just need to know how to multiply _any_ series by 10. If a = 0.999... then 10a = 9.999... Subtract a from both sides, 9a = 9, a =1. Nothing incomplete about that.
Although, you don't need any kind of algebraic proof, because it's conceptually obvious that 0.999... = 1 as a matter of definition. If you have an infinitely recurring series of 9's after the decimal point, that means as you follow the series looking for the difference between 0.999... and 1, every time you walk 'down' to the next decimal place, you find that you have to walk down again in order to discover the difference. In other words, the difference between 0.999... and 1 is infinitely small, which is 0 as a matter of definition, so therefore 0.999... must equal 1. Or, to put it another way, 0.999... is another way of writing 1, just as binary 0011 is not just numerically equal to decimal 3, but actually the same thing written down another way.
This has been public for a long time, I've known about it for at least 18 months, it's just Slashdot being slow.
If you look at the bare spec of processor speed, RAM and number of cores, a Mac is never better. But by that measure my Ford Mondeo is no better than my friend's Audi which has the same size engine and cylinder count.
At the workstation end of the market, the Apple 'premium' is worth it for the same reason that the Dell workstation premium is worth it: superb build quality, stable PSU, proper SATA drive bays (4 of), ECC RAM which can be upgraded very easily... basically everything that makes your computer the reliable thing it needs to be if you depend on it for your everday living. If you're producing e.g. video, the cost of the machine is negligible compared to the time you save on keeping it running reliably.
For laptops, there's nothing on the market that has the convenience of Apple's two-part "unibody" design, the MagLock power supply is superb, the backlit keyboard is great. Again, there's no one killer feature, but if you use your computer on the move all the time then a MacBook Pro is hard to beat, and certainly the 'Apple tax' is a myth when you compare it to similar specced (in terms of industrial design, not just raw processor speed) machines from other manufacturers.
Most Apple hardware comes with a little book of Apple stickers. I've always presumed that's so you can stick the Apple logo on the front of your beige box PC and then install OSX on it legally.
What exactly makes Mac hardware nice?
Uh... have you used any Mac hardware? I understand that lots of people have a problem with Apple's "closed" model on the iPhone (although I'm personally quite happy with it) but I've never heard anyone claim that the hardware isn't nice. Try to find a PC laptop that's have as nice as a MacBook Pro. There are a few offerings from the likes of Sony and the top end of Dell's hardware, but really if you don't mind parting with the cash there's not much else at the top of the market.
"I know of no DRM in Amiga OS..."
Then you don't know anything about Amiga OS. The OS was tied heavily to the custom chips on the motherboard, and to the Workbench ROMs, all of which were copyright owned by Commodore and normally only sold with a complete system. Even now, Amiga emulators are (in theory) illegal if you don't buy a licensed ROM image - as is the case with many emulators of very old hardware. I think most people are happy to copy now because it's so obsolete, but in the late 90s and early 2000s it was very common for the documentation for emulators of 80s and 90s hardware to suggest that you copy your own ROM image from your own machine in order to use it.
I don't know about that 10%. In the UK, during the period when Apple were only shipping pre-ordered phones, they were selling on eBay for GBP 800-1200. That's a 40-100% markup. I very nearly sold mine on, but actually needed a working phone, diary and mobile email so decided to hang on to it.
Have you actually seen an iPhone 4? It absolutely does have a raised exterior ridge, and is actually less prone to scratching than the previous designs where the thickness was greatest at the centre. AFAIK, the issue with the glass cracking/shattering seems to do with a sharp object (like a small stone) getting between the iPhone and a case, and scoring the glass just as a glass cutter does.
What you're saying cannot be correct, otherwise any international treaty between countries would be non-binding, and I'm pretty sure the UK has entered into many binding international treaties over the past couple of centuries.
I don't think you can do anything you want with content just because it's published on the web. Taking it and republishing it as your own, for example, would still be plagiarism and copyright violation, and you would still me liable.
Rubbish. Any given binary number is as likely as any other binary number of the same bit length. Finding strings of 1s and 0s of a particular length isn't a test of randomness. 0101010101010 and 111111111111 are just as likely to have been generated randomly.
By stating that '"1x1=1"' is 'true' you're interpreting the meanings of the symbols '"', 'x', '=,' and '1' in a very conservative manner.
Delivering into a plastic bag is standard neonatal practice in order to minimise insensible fluid loss. Ointment is not the best treatment by any means, and the plastic bag is a stopgap before getting the baby into an incubator with proper humidity control. You need to re-read the article: the baby was born at Worcestershire Royal Hospital because there wasn't time for an in-utero transfer to to Birmingham Heartlands (the tertiary centre); the baby was transferred ex-utero to Birmingham Heartlands and stayed there for 3 days, then downgraded to a less advanced unit.
The article doesn't say that doctors said they hadn't seen a baby that premature survive, the article says that mum says that the doctors said it. There's a big difference. Mums often don't take in all of the information they're given in the first few hours, and often fixate on one thing said by a junior member of staff, or even just don't understand at all. There's no way that none of the doctors in that centre had seen a 26-weeker survive. We know none of the other details - what was the cord pH? Was there a prolonged resuscitation with cardiac massage, drugs, etc.? What was the baby's progress over the first few hours? It's very common practice to paint a bleak picture for parents if the picture is bleak, and often they understand the bleakness but not the real reason. It's entirely possible that this is what has taken place.
There's a third option which you neglect: it's a stupid newspaper article full of hyperbole, from which you would be really silly to draw sweeping conclusions about the whole of neonatal care in the UK. Also, if you look on page 34 of this report, it seems like the WHO don't agree with your figures, at least for 2006.
You're grouping different categories of babies there. A few under 24 weeks survive, most neonatal units worldwide consider 24 weeks to be the threshold of viability, and would be very tentative about what to do with a baby under 24 weeks. The gestations and weights you mention are rare outliers, not common occurrences. Morbidity and Mortality are still very high in 24-26 weekers, but get better and better after that.
This newspaper article is a non-story however. It's standard practice to deliver extremely preterm babies into plastic, and it's not uncommon to have to improvise. Every hospital in the UK with a 24hr paediatric service will have paediatricians with experience resuscitating extremely preterm babies, and all should have the equipment to stabilise them for transfer to a more advanced unit.
It's not dense at all. He's tried to have the court compel a company to release information for a supposedly stolen dog that he apparently hasn't reported as stolen. And it's been two years since the dog went missing, so something isn't right here. People do need to take a little bit of personal responsibility for things rather than assuming there are lesions of people just sitting waiting to take up their cause.
No, the aim of the service is: if your dog gets lost, the animal rescue place that ends up with it can scan for a chip and then contact you. It's not the same as a GPS tracker fitted to a sports car.
No, that's not what the article says. He reported the company for not providing the information, and then tried to get police and the courts to compel the company to release the information. What he should do is report the theft and go from there. In fact, he should have reported the theft when the dog first disappeared, in which case he would have a crime reference number, all he would have to do is phone the police and quote the number, and explain that he has new information.