This probably means a laptop hard drive with a bit of flash, complete with all the performance impact that it entails. Computers should either be all flash (for speed) or should have a real desktop HD to provide usable capacity (i.e. 6 TB+). Any other design is a silly compromise that won't make anybody happy—either too small or too slow (or both).
Meh. Cordless charging just means an extra buck on my utility bill every month from the efficiency losses. And screen resolution is already so high that it exceeds the average human eye's ability to see individual pixels, so raising it won't improve things noticeably.
OLED might be a nice improvement, but after that, there's very little left to upgrade other than speed and putting back the headphone jack. I mean, I suppose they could add a light field camera, or they could add a 3D screen with a narrow viewing angle that probably only works in one direction, but those are basically gimmicks. They could try to make their buttons more robust/reliable, but that's something customers won't notice or care about. They could move to fuel cells for longer battery life. That might get a bit of attention. But on the whole, the technology exists and does what it needs to do. It is rapidly becoming a commodity, and future updated versions are likely to be fairly fungible with the old versions.
The pro machines never sold well. The Mac Pro had laughable sales,a s does the Mac Mini. Apple really kept them along because of the small by very vocal community who can be guaranteed to buy a few thousand units.
The purpose of pro machines isn't to sell well. The purpose of pro machines is bragging rights—specifically, being able to say that you build machines that are some of the best on the market, and being able to say that people do amazing things with your machines. But sure, if you want OS X to turn into a passive media consumption platform like iOS, keep dumbing down the hardware. Pro users will start using other platforms to do real, creative work, and eventually OS X will wither and die.
You are confusing being a consumer to being sold something. Salesmanship (and all other -ships [etymonline.com]) is a social skill.
I'm not confusing anything. I'm just saying that with at-the-tip-of-your-fingers availability for pretty much anything that exists, the only things anybody sells anymore are cars and advertising space, and even those areas are dwindling in importance. So the demand for people with that skill is basically falling off a cliff numbers-wise.
Sure it can. "macOS is an operating system written by a company that doesn't know you're supposed to capitalize proper nouns." There. See how easy that was?
You either have a hardware problem or you're installing OSes too soon after they are released. I generally avoid installing 10.x.0 and 10.x.1 for all values of x, and I can count the number of freezes I've seen in the past fifteen years on one hand.
Really, IMO, there are three separate divisions that are fairly distinct:
Theoretical CS: Reducing one NP-Complete problem to another
Practical CS: Software architecture and software engineering methodologies
IT: Network engineering and server administration
Everyone in each of those tracks needs to know a little bit about the other tracks, but not a lot.
Theoretical CS people need to know what's happening in practical CS and IT so that they can come up with interesting new problems to reduce to other problems, and thus benefit the world rather than being in a bubble. However, they don't need to know how to set up a network or write significant amounts of code.
Practical CS folks need to know enough about computational complexity to avoid writing O(n^3) algorithms as much as possible. They need to know enough about networks to understand why doing certain things can be slow, and why certain other things can bring the network to its knees. They might toss together their own servers for testing purposes, but if they're deploying something, they'll bring in IT people.
IT people need to know a bit about theoretical CS so that they can recognize that loops in network topology are bad. They need to know a bit about practical CS to understand what's going to be done on their servers and how their network will be used, because that enables them to plan better and design setups that will meet their users' needs. However, they aren't likely to do a lot of programming beyond the most basic scripting, or else they'll hire a programmer.
My guess is that each of these sub-fields has a very different makeup in terms of gender diversity, because they're very different fields. One is almost pure math, one mostly involves setting up computer systems, and one mostly involves writing software. Each caters to an entirely different type of personality. This is not to say that folks in one field can't do stuff in the other field, but rather that folks in one field aren't necessarily going to be interested in doing so.
I think it is more likely that the ratio is wrecked by the increase in popularity of CS among men more than anything else. NPR suggested video games as one possible cause, but I think it goes deeper than that. Guys are more likely to be exposed to tech at a young age (in part) because of video games. The younger you're exposed to computers, the more likely you are to go into CS. But that still doesn't explain the numbers fully, I don't think.
One thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of male programmers, but there are a lot fewer good male programmers. By contrast, I haven't known very many female programmers who weren't competent. Could a big part of the gender gap be because guys are more likely to pick a career based on ROI rather than based on whether they enjoy it and are good at it?
The fact is that programming is a shit field over the long term. If I had to do it over again, I would have just kept it as something to toy around with.
That's true for every field in one way or another. In the long run, every job is something that can eventually be outsourced, replaced by robots, or both. Getting ahead financially is about playing the percentages, picking something that pays well and that you can stand, and saving up as much money as you can for the inevitable drought later.
Seriously, this is such an unconscionable violation of basic privacy that even people who have done nothing wrong should automatically have that reaction. And anybody who has done something wrong should know better than to use a fingerprint for unlocking anyway. What was this supposed to prove other than that they have a judge who will rubber-stamp any order no matter how appalling?
First, no reactors built in the past twenty years (except in China, IIRC) lack those safety features. Passive safety might not be an official standard from a regulatory agency, but is still effectively a standard.
Second, yes, passive safety most certainly does make a plant significantly safer than active safety, particularly when you have two plants right next to one another. Imagine a scenario where a containment accident occurs at one reactor, along with a fire that damages the external power feed to the second reactor. At that point, it is unsafe for people to bring diesel fuel in to keep the emergency generators running to keep the pumps running to cool the second reactor while it shuts down, and suddenly you've gone from one meltdown event to two.
Maybe you missed where I said, "apart from the existence of the cable authentication". Yes, they still require those ICs. What I meant was that AFAIK, Apple isn't going after companies that make fake Lightning cables with their own homebrew fake authentication chips unless they advertise them as being genuine Apple cables. Similarly, they're not going after third-party companies that wire up resistors to the two data lines to enable fast charging, so long as they aren't advertising them as being Apple chargers.
If Apple was truly concerned they would issue a spec for free.
There is a specification. There are minimum requirements for separation between low-voltage and high-voltage sections that are part of various electrical codes and safety standards. These knock-offs don't meet those safety standards. They should not even be legal to import into the United States, much less sell.
The fact that Apple's designs greatly exceed the standards to the point of being exceptionally paranoid is nice and all, but not strictly necessary. But failing to meet the standards is very bad.
That's not really the point. The point is that over time, those plants will get taken offline and replaced by newer designs, and we'll be safer when that happens. If you're going to bring a new plant online, ideally, you'd like it to be based on the newest, safest designs, rather than something that met NRC regulations before Chernobyl.
Sure. Generation III and later reactors are designed to ensure passive safety—that is, the plant should be able to lose all external power and, without any further supply of fuel, etc., should be able to keep from melting down entirely on its own. Second-generation reactors don't meet those modern standards.
The requirements are well documented by third-party teardown, and dozens of companies make chargers that include the necessary pull-up resistors. So as the GP said, Apple is doing nothing to prevent third-party chargers, and apart from the existence of the cable authentication, is doing nothing to prevent third-party cables, either.
The problem is that there seems to be a strong correlation between willingness to pretend that your products are genuine Apple products and willingness to cut corners in the design that result in dangerous products. Legitimate third-party chargers from known brands generally work very well. Fake chargers that try to look like Apple products are a different story. It is legitimately hard to squeeze the necessary electronics into such a small package, much less to do so safely. As a result, Apple knock-offs tend to be significantly less safe than chargers made by people who aren't trying to pass their products off as Apple hardware.
And the knock-off fake Apple cables tend to be low-quality junk that fails after a couple of weeks of light use, unlike more legitimate third-party cables (e.g. Amazon Basics), which tend to be at least as reliable as Apple's cables, if not more so.
It's not FUD. From all accounts, these things fail with alarming regularity. When you have insufficient distance between high-voltage and low-voltage traces, when you get some extra moisture in the air that condenses in the wrong place, it can easily trigger an electrical arc that delivers 110VAC to your 5V line. In addition to roasting any device that's attached to it, such an extreme over-voltage event will give you a nasty shock if you're holding the device at the time even under the best of circumstances, and that is enough voltage to kill you under the worst of circumstances.
Assuming it isn't a solid rocket, it must contain an oxidizer tank in addition to the fuel tank or else it wouldn't be a very effective rocket. When the fuel combines with the oxidizer, it produces an exothermic reaction.
... unless, of course, somebody forgot to fill the oxidizer tank, in which case that's probably why there's a giant probe-shaped crater on the surface of Mars now.
When I say that over-regulation, discord between the NRC and ASME, NIMBY trolls, and congressional oversight cause cost and lead time issues, I don't mean that energy companies are trying to bypass safety regulations to accelerate building - there are literally too many people who don't know enough about nuclear plants in decision-making positions.
True, but on the other hand, I'd argue that Watts Bar 2 is an example of ignoring modern safety standards to accelerate building.
If I took a house that was 80% built in the early 1980s and tried to finish building it today, they'd literally make me tear it down, because it would be essentially impossible to retrofit all of the additional braces inside the walls that are required for earthquake safety, not to mention that the plumbing wouldn't be of a material that's legally allowed to be used now, the electrical wiring probably wouldn't be up to code, and even the foundation might have to be dug out and replaced. Yet they've allowed a forty-year-old nuclear reactor design to be brought online that doesn't come close to meeting modern design standards for things like passive safety.
To be fair, TVA has patched the design to mitigate some of the more serious risks based on lessons learned in Fukushima, but even still, it seems completely insane to me that they were allowed to continue building this reactor instead of being told to tear down everything but the outer shell and start over. IMO, this should have been at least a third-generation reactor, if not a III+, not an ancient second-generation design. At some point, they should stop allowing new reactors to be built using old designs, and for second-generation designs, that cutoff date should have been a couple of decades ago, give or take....
My point was that it's inconvenient to have a platform that lacks standard I/O merely because of a new standard that's currently exclusive to a handful of computer monitors. Most people don't use HDMI with monitors. They use it with TVs, where HDMI is the standard; not a standard; the standard.
The thing is, they just added HDMI for compatibility four years back, concurrent with adding mini-DisplayPort, which could be adapted to HDMI, which means that the only reason for them to have added it was for easier compatibility with TVs. If it made sense to add HDMI just a couple of years ago and doesn't make sense to keep HDMI now, there's definitely something being smoked, but it isn't by me.
The whole concept is fundamentally flawed by design. We won't see TVs take USB-C as an input on a broad scale any time soon, because there's a huge installed base of equipment that standardized on HDMI back when Apple was still arguing about whether FireWire was better than USB. When you're manufacturing equipment with a life expectancy measured in decades rather than the three-year replacement cycle for computers and cell phones, backwards compatibility is an absolute requirement. So any transition from HDMI to USB-C, if that's even possible, will take at least 1-2 decades before it is complete. Until then, we're stuck with adapters.
Is it a good idea to make USB-C available? Yes. Is it a good idea to make it possible to pass video over USB-C? Yes. Is it the right time to ditch HDMI compatibility? Heck, no.
wouldn't it be nicer if you could just go in a hotel room and attach your laptop via hdmi cable thats already in the hotel room(for tv box) to connect your laptop to it?
I've never seen a hotel that had HDMI cables. Meeting rooms, sure, but not hotel rooms. Heck, half the time, you're lucky if you don't have to ask the front desk to get the factory remote so you can have an input button. And in meeting rooms, you can safely expect the adapters to start showing up, permanently attached to cables with metal straps.
"but Apple's inclusion of an SD card slot, slow as it is, has been a significant driving force in pushing camera companies to move to SD instead of CF, and has resulted in standardization that otherwise would not have happened." -- okay I give up you are full waist deep in the RDF already if you believe this really and not for example reasons such as sd cards are smaller and there's this class of devices that shipped by the BILLIONS that uses them. cameras don't matter jack shit.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. A lot of companies started putting SD card slots into laptops, including Apple, and that was a major driving force in killing off the half dozen competing standards that existed prior to that. The point is that where Apple goes, the rest of the laptop manufacturers tend to go.
Slashdot Mirror
This probably means a laptop hard drive with a bit of flash, complete with all the performance impact that it entails. Computers should either be all flash (for speed) or should have a real desktop HD to provide usable capacity (i.e. 6 TB+). Any other design is a silly compromise that won't make anybody happy—either too small or too slow (or both).
Meh. Cordless charging just means an extra buck on my utility bill every month from the efficiency losses. And screen resolution is already so high that it exceeds the average human eye's ability to see individual pixels, so raising it won't improve things noticeably.
OLED might be a nice improvement, but after that, there's very little left to upgrade other than speed and putting back the headphone jack. I mean, I suppose they could add a light field camera, or they could add a 3D screen with a narrow viewing angle that probably only works in one direction, but those are basically gimmicks. They could try to make their buttons more robust/reliable, but that's something customers won't notice or care about. They could move to fuel cells for longer battery life. That might get a bit of attention. But on the whole, the technology exists and does what it needs to do. It is rapidly becoming a commodity, and future updated versions are likely to be fairly fungible with the old versions.
The purpose of pro machines isn't to sell well. The purpose of pro machines is bragging rights—specifically, being able to say that you build machines that are some of the best on the market, and being able to say that people do amazing things with your machines. But sure, if you want OS X to turn into a passive media consumption platform like iOS, keep dumbing down the hardware. Pro users will start using other platforms to do real, creative work, and eventually OS X will wither and die.
I'm not confusing anything. I'm just saying that with at-the-tip-of-your-fingers availability for pretty much anything that exists, the only things anybody sells anymore are cars and advertising space, and even those areas are dwindling in importance. So the demand for people with that skill is basically falling off a cliff numbers-wise.
Sure it can. "macOS is an operating system written by a company that doesn't know you're supposed to capitalize proper nouns." There. See how easy that was?
You either have a hardware problem or you're installing OSes too soon after they are released. I generally avoid installing 10.x.0 and 10.x.1 for all values of x, and I can count the number of freezes I've seen in the past fifteen years on one hand.
Give it time.
Salesmanship? Amazon made that moot already. Leadership? Only matters if there are still workers left to lead.
I stand corrected. There's a third category: Government jobs, where you're required to act like a robot.
Really, IMO, there are three separate divisions that are fairly distinct:
Everyone in each of those tracks needs to know a little bit about the other tracks, but not a lot.
My guess is that each of these sub-fields has a very different makeup in terms of gender diversity, because they're very different fields. One is almost pure math, one mostly involves setting up computer systems, and one mostly involves writing software. Each caters to an entirely different type of personality. This is not to say that folks in one field can't do stuff in the other field, but rather that folks in one field aren't necessarily going to be interested in doing so.
I think it is more likely that the ratio is wrecked by the increase in popularity of CS among men more than anything else. NPR suggested video games as one possible cause, but I think it goes deeper than that. Guys are more likely to be exposed to tech at a young age (in part) because of video games. The younger you're exposed to computers, the more likely you are to go into CS. But that still doesn't explain the numbers fully, I don't think.
One thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of male programmers, but there are a lot fewer good male programmers. By contrast, I haven't known very many female programmers who weren't competent. Could a big part of the gender gap be because guys are more likely to pick a career based on ROI rather than based on whether they enjoy it and are good at it?
That's true for every field in one way or another. In the long run, every job is something that can eventually be outsourced, replaced by robots, or both. Getting ahead financially is about playing the percentages, picking something that pays well and that you can stand, and saving up as much money as you can for the inevitable drought later.
... keep holding it down.
Seriously, this is such an unconscionable violation of basic privacy that even people who have done nothing wrong should automatically have that reaction. And anybody who has done something wrong should know better than to use a fingerprint for unlocking anyway. What was this supposed to prove other than that they have a judge who will rubber-stamp any order no matter how appalling?
First, no reactors built in the past twenty years (except in China, IIRC) lack those safety features. Passive safety might not be an official standard from a regulatory agency, but is still effectively a standard.
Second, yes, passive safety most certainly does make a plant significantly safer than active safety, particularly when you have two plants right next to one another. Imagine a scenario where a containment accident occurs at one reactor, along with a fire that damages the external power feed to the second reactor. At that point, it is unsafe for people to bring diesel fuel in to keep the emergency generators running to keep the pumps running to cool the second reactor while it shuts down, and suddenly you've gone from one meltdown event to two.
Maybe you missed where I said, "apart from the existence of the cable authentication". Yes, they still require those ICs. What I meant was that AFAIK, Apple isn't going after companies that make fake Lightning cables with their own homebrew fake authentication chips unless they advertise them as being genuine Apple cables. Similarly, they're not going after third-party companies that wire up resistors to the two data lines to enable fast charging, so long as they aren't advertising them as being Apple chargers.
There is a specification. There are minimum requirements for separation between low-voltage and high-voltage sections that are part of various electrical codes and safety standards. These knock-offs don't meet those safety standards. They should not even be legal to import into the United States, much less sell.
The fact that Apple's designs greatly exceed the standards to the point of being exceptionally paranoid is nice and all, but not strictly necessary. But failing to meet the standards is very bad.
That's not really the point. The point is that over time, those plants will get taken offline and replaced by newer designs, and we'll be safer when that happens. If you're going to bring a new plant online, ideally, you'd like it to be based on the newest, safest designs, rather than something that met NRC regulations before Chernobyl.
Tsunamis, no, but the Tennessee River can and does flood.
Sure. Generation III and later reactors are designed to ensure passive safety—that is, the plant should be able to lose all external power and, without any further supply of fuel, etc., should be able to keep from melting down entirely on its own. Second-generation reactors don't meet those modern standards.
The requirements are well documented by third-party teardown, and dozens of companies make chargers that include the necessary pull-up resistors. So as the GP said, Apple is doing nothing to prevent third-party chargers, and apart from the existence of the cable authentication, is doing nothing to prevent third-party cables, either.
The problem is that there seems to be a strong correlation between willingness to pretend that your products are genuine Apple products and willingness to cut corners in the design that result in dangerous products. Legitimate third-party chargers from known brands generally work very well. Fake chargers that try to look like Apple products are a different story. It is legitimately hard to squeeze the necessary electronics into such a small package, much less to do so safely. As a result, Apple knock-offs tend to be significantly less safe than chargers made by people who aren't trying to pass their products off as Apple hardware.
And the knock-off fake Apple cables tend to be low-quality junk that fails after a couple of weeks of light use, unlike more legitimate third-party cables (e.g. Amazon Basics), which tend to be at least as reliable as Apple's cables, if not more so.
It's not FUD. From all accounts, these things fail with alarming regularity. When you have insufficient distance between high-voltage and low-voltage traces, when you get some extra moisture in the air that condenses in the wrong place, it can easily trigger an electrical arc that delivers 110VAC to your 5V line. In addition to roasting any device that's attached to it, such an extreme over-voltage event will give you a nasty shock if you're holding the device at the time even under the best of circumstances, and that is enough voltage to kill you under the worst of circumstances.
Assuming it isn't a solid rocket, it must contain an oxidizer tank in addition to the fuel tank or else it wouldn't be a very effective rocket. When the fuel combines with the oxidizer, it produces an exothermic reaction.
... unless, of course, somebody forgot to fill the oxidizer tank, in which case that's probably why there's a giant probe-shaped crater on the surface of Mars now.
True, but on the other hand, I'd argue that Watts Bar 2 is an example of ignoring modern safety standards to accelerate building.
If I took a house that was 80% built in the early 1980s and tried to finish building it today, they'd literally make me tear it down, because it would be essentially impossible to retrofit all of the additional braces inside the walls that are required for earthquake safety, not to mention that the plumbing wouldn't be of a material that's legally allowed to be used now, the electrical wiring probably wouldn't be up to code, and even the foundation might have to be dug out and replaced. Yet they've allowed a forty-year-old nuclear reactor design to be brought online that doesn't come close to meeting modern design standards for things like passive safety.
To be fair, TVA has patched the design to mitigate some of the more serious risks based on lessons learned in Fukushima, but even still, it seems completely insane to me that they were allowed to continue building this reactor instead of being told to tear down everything but the outer shell and start over. IMO, this should have been at least a third-generation reactor, if not a III+, not an ancient second-generation design. At some point, they should stop allowing new reactors to be built using old designs, and for second-generation designs, that cutoff date should have been a couple of decades ago, give or take....
My point was that it's inconvenient to have a platform that lacks standard I/O merely because of a new standard that's currently exclusive to a handful of computer monitors. Most people don't use HDMI with monitors. They use it with TVs, where HDMI is the standard; not a standard; the standard.
The thing is, they just added HDMI for compatibility four years back, concurrent with adding mini-DisplayPort, which could be adapted to HDMI, which means that the only reason for them to have added it was for easier compatibility with TVs. If it made sense to add HDMI just a couple of years ago and doesn't make sense to keep HDMI now, there's definitely something being smoked, but it isn't by me.
Past tense.
The whole concept is fundamentally flawed by design. We won't see TVs take USB-C as an input on a broad scale any time soon, because there's a huge installed base of equipment that standardized on HDMI back when Apple was still arguing about whether FireWire was better than USB. When you're manufacturing equipment with a life expectancy measured in decades rather than the three-year replacement cycle for computers and cell phones, backwards compatibility is an absolute requirement. So any transition from HDMI to USB-C, if that's even possible, will take at least 1-2 decades before it is complete. Until then, we're stuck with adapters.
Is it a good idea to make USB-C available? Yes. Is it a good idea to make it possible to pass video over USB-C? Yes. Is it the right time to ditch HDMI compatibility? Heck, no.
I've never seen a hotel that had HDMI cables. Meeting rooms, sure, but not hotel rooms. Heck, half the time, you're lucky if you don't have to ask the front desk to get the factory remote so you can have an input button. And in meeting rooms, you can safely expect the adapters to start showing up, permanently attached to cables with metal straps.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. A lot of companies started putting SD card slots into laptops, including Apple, and that was a major driving force in killing off the half dozen competing standards that existed prior to that. The point is that where Apple goes, the rest of the laptop manufacturers tend to go.