Oookay, kiddo. Now let's start the thinking, shall we?
1. The stats you quote are taken from w3schools.com
2. w3schools.com is a website containing some tutorials for web-related languages and technologies.
3. People interested in the topics covered by w3schools are a small subset of all web surfers.
4. People reading or using w3schools are another subset of this subset of surfers; according to their stats mostly Firefox users
Conclusion: Looking at those stats as an indicator of browser usage on the www and in various intranets is about as smart as using stats gathered on/. as representative indicators of linux' market penetration or calculating apple's market share from a survey in some Mac Owners Lounge.
The sides and top of a case are large metal surfaces with direct exposure to outside air. If you use aluminium, their heat transport ability is great (beaten mostly by heavy (copper, silver) or expensive (diamond, carbon nanotubes) stuff). Pushing as much energy as you possibly can into and through them is the only sensible thing to do.
The game teaches you the theory of something (e.g. how often and in what order to perform mouth-to-mouth and CPR), not the actual machanics (e.g. where exactly to apply pressure and how much air pressure's needed). The same applies for negative aspects, too. You may learn where to aim when shooting at someone x distance away, but you won't learn how to steadily shoot a rifle from an ego shooter. You may learn where to stab for lethal effect, but you won't learn how to actually use a knife to stab someone who's hitting back.
Also, violent movies tend to be more insirational when it comes to innovative ways on how to kill people. They can teach you the technique, just like games and won't provide any hands-on experience, again, just like games.
Having to carry around a DVI-VGA converter all the time may not bother you, but it's not something I'd want to be bothered with. Like many people who actually use their notebooks for work, I want to be able to hook it up to whatever kind of Ethernet and VGA cable's hanging out of whatever kind of room I'm in at any given moment.
Apple laptops having DVI is fine and well, but you ought to realize they simply don't matter. Apple has a market share of some 5%. They have had Motorola and Power processors for the longest time, which, as it turns out, wasn't an advantage of theirs. Just because they are doing something doesn't mean it's the future or anybody else is going to adapt anytime soon.
iPods (there's more than one. C'mon, what the fuck is wrong with Apple's naming system? Using people-name grammar for product names?) unfortunately are selling too consistently to be a passing fad. Actually, in the current generation the hardware seems to have gotten pretty usable. Now if Apple could get rid of that iTunes piece of crap, I might actually consider switching to one. Looking at recent lockdown attempts by Apple I don't really think I will. Here's to the general public realizing they're not cooler than the rest by having the same music player and buying for technical superiority instead.
As GP said, it's the "I make more money than you, therefore I have this laptop" market. I, for one, find them to look rather intriguing. Not as intriguing as an X61s plus $3k (a maxed out X61s goes for some $2k, the true Reserve Ed. $5k), but if money's no object I don't see a reason why not.
OTOH, if money's no object, a two-pound Sony sub or even an MBA just to toy around with wouldn't be out of the question, either.
IIRC a new 3.5" hard disk would read and write something in the ballpark of 80 MB/s, fast notebook devices in the 40 MB/s region and 1.8" ones (think ThinkPad X40, MacBook Air) ranging from 20-30 MB/s.
250 MB/s may be possible for SATA2 devices when reading straight from the 8-32 megs of cache on disk, but even then you'd have to be rather lucky.
That's the difference between "Compatibility" and "DVI is hip now. If your hardware or whatever projectors in whatever client's rooms you're plugging your devices in don't support DVI, they SUCK! Get new hardware and/or clients or the Steve won't like you anymore".
Battery runtime: Remove integrated optical device, add another 3-cell battery into it's slot: 8 hours. Also, knowing ThinkPads, there's probably going to be a 6-cell extended life battery anyways, so 12 hours could be possible.
Case durability: The Air's made out of solid aluminium. Thinkpads are made out of some very strange kind of titanium-adamantium-nukeproof whatever alloy. What I'm getting to - chances of this thing being scratched by anything are about as large as 1 divided by Steve Jobs' ego. Nil.
Many ThinkPad users would, just as they do with regular MacBooks, consider MacBook Airs toys. Having a minimum set of connectivity options may not be on top of the hipster's Notebooks that look cool and feature at least seven Apple logos list, but often are a factor when it comes to chosing a vendor for the next generation of dull work notebooks. A toy not having a rather usual expansion slot isn't that big of a deal; the corporate workhorse series of notebooks missing it is somewhat new.
By the way: The X61 tablet's part where PC-cards are inserted is some.6 inches thick and has an SD card slot beneath the PC-card. The T60's combined PC- and ExpressCard slot clocks in at a bit more than.7 inches.
Keep in mind recent parallelization advances. According to TFA, raytracing performance scales almost linearly with the number of processors (factor 15.2 for four quadcore machines connected via GigE over a single core); both Crossfire and SLI don't scale remotely that great.
If the parallelization trend continues like it's progressing now, manicore CPUs are probable to arrive before 2010. Also, both AMD and Intel appear to be undertaking steps in the direction of enthusiast-grade multi-socket systems, increasing the average number of cores once again. Assuming raytracing can be parallelized as gread as TFA makes it sound, rendering could just return to the CPUs. I'm no expert, but it does sound kinda nice.
Severity is the most important factor of 'em all. If you're faced with a trial for some speeding under good circumstances your case isn't severe, so your punishment probably won't be either. If charges include mass murder, rape or copyright infringement, your expectancy to get out of it with less than a few life sentences are few to none. Chances are, you're not going to contine the life you've been leading. Many would probably prefer the life of a professional tequila drinker in Mexico to the one of a long-time prison guest. Many would act accordingly.
Programmers tend to be technical people tend to be well-educated people tend to be people who approach problems in a scientific way tend to be people who don't really give a fuck about religious oxpoop.
Asking an agnostic to swear with some deity as their witness is about as clever as asking a fish to swear, under penalty of death thru drowning. I'm not saying there's no religious programmers, but I sure think they're a rather minor group.
My Thinkpad tablet has survived two- to three-foot drops onto concrete, being banged against walls while I was holding it on the display and lots of other abuse with but a few minor blemishes. It's not as thin as an MB Air, but it's also a single-hinge model. Multi-hinge notebooks can be built to almost any thinness desired thanks to (expensive) modern alloys.
Rendezvous is a network discovery protocol. TransferJet is a wireless filetransfer connection. That's not even apples to oranges anymore, it's like comparing a turkey sandwich to cellophane wrap for a turkey sandwich. Coincidentally I find most Apple products to be about as useful as wrap around a sandwich I'd like to eat, but that's not up for discussion here.
Yet kilometers of walking are worth not having to accept The Steve as some kind of god.
Useless? Think again. Think "screw the TV-out cable" and "put your digicam on a designated plate on your TV to start the slideshow". Think "screw the (Sony-typical) proprietary-connector-to-USB cable" and "put your digicam onto your PC to add new photos to your collection". Think "share that song from your mp3 player to that nice girl's by holding them close together (cue 'accidental' touch of hands, deep look into each other's eyes, founding of family (or so they say))".
If (and that's a big if) the range can actually be limited to some 3 centimeters, you can do away with BlueTooth's security annoyances and still stay safe. You could even have a TransferJet pad on your desk linked to the computer via W-USB. This thing is competing with annoying adapter cables, not any wireless standard.
I start to see a pattern here. DAT should replace cassettes, wasn't really used in the mainstream, is/was liked by semi-professionals and professionals. MD was a try to replace CDs. After a few years many of the remaining users use it to semi-professionally record audio. BetaMax competed with VHS and was, IIRC, used in the same way.
The factor stopping from history repeating itself seems to be a huge installed base of cameras for MS, the PS3 for BD and fatal incompatibility with anything for the UMD. What will they be changing?
Try looking at "Universal" as an adjective for "Media", then it all works out. It does hold all kinds (Movies, Games, Music(?)) of Media for use in a single device.
Calling it "Universal" remains a bit pompous yet (imo) acceptable. PSD (PlayStation Disc) or something would've been nice, but if it had actually gained traction, UMD would fit better.
Assuming the following professions as artists, here are my solutions:
Musicians Live performances, merchandise, nicely packaged albums with some extra value instead of just a combined cover/tracklist leaflet.
Painters, Sculpturers A picture of a painting or sculpture enables you to look at the respective artifact mainly for purposes of studying it. Enjoying the art usually does take the real thing.
Animators, Filmmakers (cinema type) Take the experience back to the big screen. Home theatres are getting awefully awesome nowadays, so take care real theatres don't lose out on quality aspects and keep up.
Animators, Filmmakers (tv type) Customer interests are shifting. People want to watch whatever they feel like whenever they feel like without interruptions (i.e. ads). deal with it.
Film actors Either keep going letting the filmmaker do all the shifting work or explore new venues. Live is big again. People like to pay more and will give up control about time and place for awesome live performances of both music and acting (e.g. theatre, musicals, opera).
Writers (novelists) Unless absolutely necessary (e.g. reading pre-release versions of new Harry Potter books to have some spoilers ready for launch parties), extremely few people like to read long segments on a screen, so you're fine. Amazon is doing an amazing job with Kindle, others will follow suit. 2008 can be your year of Napster, your opportunity to get a competitive and customer-friendly electronic distribution to work before pirates do. Text can be distributed easily and practically instantaneous without infrastructural issues. Be quick and satisfy the general public before pirates do it -- they will.
Writers (press & co.) For you too, this can be a golden age. Competition is harder than ever; thanks to blogs anybody can be a reporter. Standing out can attract a huge audience quicker and easier than ever. Be a journalist instead of just a reporter, cater to people's interests and a simple blogger account with some googly ads are all you need.
Everybody (summed up) The world is changing. People want comfort and/or an extraordinary experience. Provide one and you're on the winning side. Provide both and you're right on track to greatness.
Yeah. Maybe, just maybe the rest of Europe would also see how well this works for Sweden and follow suit. I can really imagine the second largest economy (and current laughing stock of the world) trying to threaten the largest one on behalf of a few media companies. Not.
Most of them probably do, too. Speed limits are a great example for a very simple tradeoff between freedom* and security. I'm convinced most communities wouldn't significantly change their limits in a direct vote; even voters with zero political interest ought to be able to estimate a good balance between their need to get somewhere quickly and their desire not to get overrun by somebody doing 80 mph midtown.
In the extremes some legislative boundaries might be in order. As long as schoolchildren don't vote and a majority of drivers don't currently go to school, half of the voted upon in town speed would seem like a sensible limit around schools.
Legalizing file sharing does have a weakening effect on the copyright system. OTOH, the current form of the copyright system is a very sad and disrespectful perversion of what it was intended to be. Changing it in a way to enable future generations to freely share media might actually return it to a state where it "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
I, for one, still hope for a change that'd put the benefits of copyright back into the hands of people, instead of corporations. The probability of this varies from quite likely (Sweden) to "yeah right" (The U.S. of A.), but I think I might still pick up another language.:]
Many systems, especially in the government, stay internal and are completely disconnected from the internet.
Those systems won't need Firefox. If they do need to access an internal web application, this app will work with IE. It may work with Fx, too, but currently no medium to large web apps are built without IE compatibility in mind.
Anyways, since the amount of sites has been reduced to a trusted circle, it'd actually be a rather bad idea to use Firefox. IE does launch faster, IE will render most pages faster and IE will integrate better into the typical office workflow many average users are used to. Both the alleged security clear customizability advantages of Firefox are useless in that type of environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Oookay, kiddo. Now let's start the thinking, shall we?
/. as representative indicators of linux' market penetration or calculating apple's market share from a survey in some Mac Owners Lounge.
1. The stats you quote are taken from w3schools.com
2. w3schools.com is a website containing some tutorials for web-related languages and technologies.
3. People interested in the topics covered by w3schools are a small subset of all web surfers.
4. People reading or using w3schools are another subset of this subset of surfers; according to their stats mostly Firefox users
Conclusion: Looking at those stats as an indicator of browser usage on the www and in various intranets is about as smart as using stats gathered on
The sides and top of a case are large metal surfaces with direct exposure to outside air. If you use aluminium, their heat transport ability is great (beaten mostly by heavy (copper, silver) or expensive (diamond, carbon nanotubes) stuff). Pushing as much energy as you possibly can into and through them is the only sensible thing to do.
No offense but I'm male and dig chicks, so way outside Apple's target demographic.
The game teaches you the theory of something (e.g. how often and in what order to perform mouth-to-mouth and CPR), not the actual machanics (e.g. where exactly to apply pressure and how much air pressure's needed). The same applies for negative aspects, too. You may learn where to aim when shooting at someone x distance away, but you won't learn how to steadily shoot a rifle from an ego shooter. You may learn where to stab for lethal effect, but you won't learn how to actually use a knife to stab someone who's hitting back.
Also, violent movies tend to be more insirational when it comes to innovative ways on how to kill people. They can teach you the technique, just like games and won't provide any hands-on experience, again, just like games.
Having to carry around a DVI-VGA converter all the time may not bother you, but it's not something I'd want to be bothered with. Like many people who actually use their notebooks for work, I want to be able to hook it up to whatever kind of Ethernet and VGA cable's hanging out of whatever kind of room I'm in at any given moment.
Apple laptops having DVI is fine and well, but you ought to realize they simply don't matter. Apple has a market share of some 5%. They have had Motorola and Power processors for the longest time, which, as it turns out, wasn't an advantage of theirs. Just because they are doing something doesn't mean it's the future or anybody else is going to adapt anytime soon.
iPods (there's more than one. C'mon, what the fuck is wrong with Apple's naming system? Using people-name grammar for product names?) unfortunately are selling too consistently to be a passing fad. Actually, in the current generation the hardware seems to have gotten pretty usable. Now if Apple could get rid of that iTunes piece of crap, I might actually consider switching to one. Looking at recent lockdown attempts by Apple I don't really think I will. Here's to the general public realizing they're not cooler than the rest by having the same music player and buying for technical superiority instead.
As GP said, it's the "I make more money than you, therefore I have this laptop" market. I, for one, find them to look rather intriguing. Not as intriguing as an X61s plus $3k (a maxed out X61s goes for some $2k, the true Reserve Ed. $5k), but if money's no object I don't see a reason why not.
OTOH, if money's no object, a two-pound Sony sub or even an MBA just to toy around with wouldn't be out of the question, either.
IIRC a new 3.5" hard disk would read and write something in the ballpark of 80 MB/s, fast notebook devices in the 40 MB/s region and 1.8" ones (think ThinkPad X40, MacBook Air) ranging from 20-30 MB/s. 250 MB/s may be possible for SATA2 devices when reading straight from the 8-32 megs of cache on disk, but even then you'd have to be rather lucky.
That's the difference between "Compatibility" and "DVI is hip now. If your hardware or whatever projectors in whatever client's rooms you're plugging your devices in don't support DVI, they SUCK! Get new hardware and/or clients or the Steve won't like you anymore".
Battery runtime: Remove integrated optical device, add another 3-cell battery into it's slot: 8 hours. Also, knowing ThinkPads, there's probably going to be a 6-cell extended life battery anyways, so 12 hours could be possible.
Case durability: The Air's made out of solid aluminium. Thinkpads are made out of some very strange kind of titanium-adamantium-nukeproof whatever alloy. What I'm getting to - chances of this thing being scratched by anything are about as large as 1 divided by Steve Jobs' ego. Nil.
Many ThinkPad users would, just as they do with regular MacBooks, consider MacBook Airs toys. Having a minimum set of connectivity options may not be on top of the hipster's Notebooks that look cool and feature at least seven Apple logos list, but often are a factor when it comes to chosing a vendor for the next generation of dull work notebooks. A toy not having a rather usual expansion slot isn't that big of a deal; the corporate workhorse series of notebooks missing it is somewhat new.
.6 inches thick and has an SD card slot beneath the PC-card. The T60's combined PC- and ExpressCard slot clocks in at a bit more than .7 inches.
By the way: The X61 tablet's part where PC-cards are inserted is some
Like?
(I'm genuinely interested. Got some links for further reading?)
Keep in mind recent parallelization advances. According to TFA, raytracing performance scales almost linearly with the number of processors (factor 15.2 for four quadcore machines connected via GigE over a single core); both Crossfire and SLI don't scale remotely that great.
If the parallelization trend continues like it's progressing now, manicore CPUs are probable to arrive before 2010. Also, both AMD and Intel appear to be undertaking steps in the direction of enthusiast-grade multi-socket systems, increasing the average number of cores once again. Assuming raytracing can be parallelized as gread as TFA makes it sound, rendering could just return to the CPUs. I'm no expert, but it does sound kinda nice.
Severity is the most important factor of 'em all. If you're faced with a trial for some speeding under good circumstances your case isn't severe, so your punishment probably won't be either. If charges include mass murder, rape or copyright infringement, your expectancy to get out of it with less than a few life sentences are few to none. Chances are, you're not going to contine the life you've been leading. Many would probably prefer the life of a professional tequila drinker in Mexico to the one of a long-time prison guest. Many would act accordingly.
Programmers tend to be technical people tend to be well-educated people tend to be people who approach problems in a scientific way tend to be people who don't really give a fuck about religious oxpoop.
Asking an agnostic to swear with some deity as their witness is about as clever as asking a fish to swear, under penalty of death thru drowning. I'm not saying there's no religious programmers, but I sure think they're a rather minor group.
My Thinkpad tablet has survived two- to three-foot drops onto concrete, being banged against walls while I was holding it on the display and lots of other abuse with but a few minor blemishes. It's not as thin as an MB Air, but it's also a single-hinge model. Multi-hinge notebooks can be built to almost any thinness desired thanks to (expensive) modern alloys.
Rendezvous is a network discovery protocol. TransferJet is a wireless filetransfer connection. That's not even apples to oranges anymore, it's like comparing a turkey sandwich to cellophane wrap for a turkey sandwich. Coincidentally I find most Apple products to be about as useful as wrap around a sandwich I'd like to eat, but that's not up for discussion here.
Yet kilometers of walking are worth not having to accept The Steve as some kind of god.
Useless? Think again. Think "screw the TV-out cable" and "put your digicam on a designated plate on your TV to start the slideshow". Think "screw the (Sony-typical) proprietary-connector-to-USB cable" and "put your digicam onto your PC to add new photos to your collection". Think "share that song from your mp3 player to that nice girl's by holding them close together (cue 'accidental' touch of hands, deep look into each other's eyes, founding of family (or so they say))".
If (and that's a big if) the range can actually be limited to some 3 centimeters, you can do away with BlueTooth's security annoyances and still stay safe. You could even have a TransferJet pad on your desk linked to the computer via W-USB. This thing is competing with annoying adapter cables, not any wireless standard.
I start to see a pattern here. DAT should replace cassettes, wasn't really used in the mainstream, is/was liked by semi-professionals and professionals. MD was a try to replace CDs. After a few years many of the remaining users use it to semi-professionally record audio. BetaMax competed with VHS and was, IIRC, used in the same way.
The factor stopping from history repeating itself seems to be a huge installed base of cameras for MS, the PS3 for BD and fatal incompatibility with anything for the UMD. What will they be changing?
Try looking at "Universal" as an adjective for "Media", then it all works out. It does hold all kinds (Movies, Games, Music(?)) of Media for use in a single device.
Calling it "Universal" remains a bit pompous yet (imo) acceptable. PSD (PlayStation Disc) or something would've been nice, but if it had actually gained traction, UMD would fit better.
Live performances, merchandise, nicely packaged albums with some extra value instead of just a combined cover/tracklist leaflet.
A picture of a painting or sculpture enables you to look at the respective artifact mainly for purposes of studying it. Enjoying the art usually does take the real thing.
Take the experience back to the big screen. Home theatres are getting awefully awesome nowadays, so take care real theatres don't lose out on quality aspects and keep up.
Customer interests are shifting. People want to watch whatever they feel like whenever they feel like without interruptions (i.e. ads). deal with it.
Either keep going letting the filmmaker do all the shifting work or explore new venues. Live is big again. People like to pay more and will give up control about time and place for awesome live performances of both music and acting (e.g. theatre, musicals, opera).
Unless absolutely necessary (e.g. reading pre-release versions of new Harry Potter books to have some spoilers ready for launch parties), extremely few people like to read long segments on a screen, so you're fine. Amazon is doing an amazing job with Kindle, others will follow suit. 2008 can be your year of Napster, your opportunity to get a competitive and customer-friendly electronic distribution to work before pirates do. Text can be distributed easily and practically instantaneous without infrastructural issues. Be quick and satisfy the general public before pirates do it -- they will.
For you too, this can be a golden age. Competition is harder than ever; thanks to blogs anybody can be a reporter. Standing out can attract a huge audience quicker and easier than ever. Be a journalist instead of just a reporter, cater to people's interests and a simple blogger account with some googly ads are all you need.
The world is changing. People want comfort and/or an extraordinary experience. Provide one and you're on the winning side. Provide both and you're right on track to greatness.
Yeah. Maybe, just maybe the rest of Europe would also see how well this works for Sweden and follow suit. I can really imagine the second largest economy (and current laughing stock of the world) trying to threaten the largest one on behalf of a few media companies. Not.
Most of them probably do, too. Speed limits are a great example for a very simple tradeoff between freedom* and security. I'm convinced most communities wouldn't significantly change their limits in a direct vote; even voters with zero political interest ought to be able to estimate a good balance between their need to get somewhere quickly and their desire not to get overrun by somebody doing 80 mph midtown.
:]
In the extremes some legislative boundaries might be in order. As long as schoolchildren don't vote and a majority of drivers don't currently go to school, half of the voted upon in town speed would seem like a sensible limit around schools.
Legalizing file sharing does have a weakening effect on the copyright system. OTOH, the current form of the copyright system is a very sad and disrespectful perversion of what it was intended to be. Changing it in a way to enable future generations to freely share media might actually return it to a state where it "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
I, for one, still hope for a change that'd put the benefits of copyright back into the hands of people, instead of corporations. The probability of this varies from quite likely (Sweden) to "yeah right" (The U.S. of A.), but I think I might still pick up another language.
Anyways, since the amount of sites has been reduced to a trusted circle, it'd actually be a rather bad idea to use Firefox. IE does launch faster, IE will render most pages faster and IE will integrate better into the typical office workflow many average users are used to. Both the alleged security clear customizability advantages of Firefox are useless in that type of environment.
"Windows is most stable when replaced by a decent flavour of Linux before booting."
Whoa. You cost 100 an hour, (apparently) work in IT and still use Norton? Masochist.