... for a comparable computer (yes, this means no leaving out wireless, firewire, and all of those things Mac users use and take for granted)...
You guys just keep redefining "comparable" until you're right. Suppose I define "comparable" to mean that it has free expansion slots and available drive bays; you know, those things that PC users takes for granted. I can get that from Dell starting at $299. To get that from Apple, I have to pay at least $1499. Sure that $299 PC's a Celeron doorstop, but if we use my definition it makes me right. Spend a little more, even into the $400-500 range and you can get a pretty good computer, and they frequently have better computers on special.
You pay for what you get. You get a slick operating system and a fancy case. I get to keep more money in my wallet. Everyone's happy.
And if you don't like their prices -- don't buy a Mac. What? You want the full Mac experience but don't want to pay for it? So you want the full BMW M6 driving experience, but want to pay the cost of a Ford Focus? That's your problem, not Apple's (or BMW).
They charge a premium fee for the Apple brand and there's nothing wrong with that. The "Apple Experience", as others have dubbed it, is indeed worth the additional cost to many people. You compare Apple to BMW, yet BMW does the exact same thing; they charge more for a premium brand.
Apple sells hardware yes, but they don't just sell hardware. They sell the Apple experience.
Now, does it make more sense for Apple to sell that experience at $2000 a pop or at $100 a pop?
Apple sells computers with software that makes them unique and different than other computers. It gives them an edge over Dell and Gateway, who are their real competitors, not Microsoft. Switching to x86 lowers their cost, increases performance, and gives users the option to run Windows if they must. It makes sense. Letting other PCs run Mac OS, OTOH, destroys Apple's status as a premium brand will kill their hardware business.
I realize you really want to run OS X on your current box and the announcement has got you excited that it might happen, but it just isn't a sound business decision for Apple. I know what I'd want if I were an Apple shareholder - I'd want them to milk their premium brand, not give it away to their biggest competitors.
A simple Google search shows that while yes, on rare occaision some parts of India have reached 47-49 C, even 45 C was considered an "record heat wave" in 2002, whereas "normal" is considered 40-43. My hometown in California averages 37 throughout summer with peaks in the 40s and there are plenty others nearby who fair worse.
Wouldn't he cut out the middleman here (and thus, theoretically increase efficiency of the system) by simply leaving his freezer door open with a fan in front of it?
As others have pointed out, in order to cool the insides, your freezer produces heat that normally gets dissipated back into the room. If you leave the door open the freezer will have to work harder to cool a larger space, producing more heat, making it harder to cool. Your freezer not being anywhere close to 100% efficient, you will actually end up heating your room. (Not to mention sending your electric bill sky high.)
At my university, most lab/public computers are mostly open (except for those in the library.. weird). No anti-spyware/virus stuff AFIAK. Their most effective security measure is that nothing is committed to disk, so rebooting cures all. Locking down the computers for people who know what they're doing usually causes more problems than it solves, so they (partially) trust us.
Everyone these days has a USB memory stick, so there's always an accessible USB port. From said memory stick, you can run any software you'd like, including keyloggers. But if I couldn't run a keylogger, I couldn't run useful apps either. For example, I keep a copy of PuTTY on my stick and I'm able to SSH into my mainframe account and work on CS projects from anywhere on campus.
I'm sure the smart [h,cr]acker could easily gather lots of juicy information, but mostly I'm not worried. In a university environment people are usually there out of self-interest and aren't out to read your email. Sure I'm taking a chance, but the alternative is a certain pain in the ass. I'd much rather carry around a USB stick than a hulking laptop (or use a tiny laptop with a tiny keyboard and a tiny screen).
Is Maxim Magazine porn? I personally think it is. (defined: "Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.") Should Maxim have a plastic cover just because I think it's porn? Should we force Maxim Online to.xxx? Most of TV fits that definition too -- www.fox.xxx has a nice ring to it. (It really does. They should buy it just because.)
I'm serious here. I'm not just playing the devil's advocate. I honestly believe Maxim is porn. I know there are lots of people who disagree with me, notably the people who subscribe to or work for Maxim. I just don't see why my point of view, or anyone else's, has any business being enshrined in the law or forced upon others.
If Apple ports their OS to Intel, so that it can run on standard PC architecture, then they become an OS vendor...
Which will not happen as long as Apple has anything to do with it. There's much more profit to be made selling $2000 computers than selling $100 software.
New Macs will have an Intel CPU. That's really all that's going to change. Mac OS will definitely not run on other computers, and I'll be very surprised if Windows runs right out of the box. You know there's going to be a ROM chip or some sort of proprietary hardware Macs have and PCs lack. Mac OS will require it and the chip will require Mac OS.
-For cameras whose RAW format is publicly available, start image processing from RAW. -For cameras with undocumented RAW formats, convert to something like.bmp first and work from that.
Admittedly, I'm not a photographer or a graphic artist, but I'm a little confused as to how those are really any different. Chances are your image manipulation is done in Photoshop/GIMP/etc. If you use a Photoshop plugin, doesn't the plugin simply convert the RAW format internally? I assume Photoshop has some kind of standardized way of storing image data in memory so that it can be processed by the plugins and filters you want to use. The plugin's job* is to convert it to that format, which you might as well do outside of Photoshop.
Short of using a format-specific tool, it doesn't seem like there's any sort of image manipulation that would really benefit from the RAW format, because they all do an internal conversion anyway.
So someone, please educate me as to how a RAW plugin is any better than converting to lossless format first. It's not that I'm advocating that it isn't better, I just don't know.
From an engineering standpoint, I think Apple could have added a few extra cubic millimeters to the battery size (and overall size) without sacrificing anything in the overall design. This way they would have delivered a real-world 8 hours of battery life, could have advertised it and those 3 people that start it up and listen without skipping or any UI interaction would have gotten 15 hours.
You've got it backwards. As happens with many such devices, they likely decided on a size of the battery that will give them approximately the right battery life long before they could possibly know it exactly. Then you build the device, test to see how long the battery actually lasts under "normal conditions", and put that number in your marketing. What you're really asking for is a more demanding definition of "normal conditions", which is frankly a marketing decision, not an engineering one.
... I'm sure that a few carefully designed chips and software would enable a high level of functionality and low level of power consumption.
The only reason battery power hasn't become more of an issue is because that sort of thing has already happened. Scores of technical advances in the last few decades have dramatically reduced the power consumption of common hardware features. Unfortunately, marketing continues to demand that the design incorporate more features to compensate and smaller size. Laptops, cell phones, PDAs, etc. now get about the same battery life as they did years ago because every advance in efficiency is complemented by a smaller battery and more features.
Granted, the situation ended "well" in the sense that the hijacker was ultimately stopped by air marshals, but one could imagine a much worse situation. For example, there still aren't any air marshals on many (most?) US domestic flights. Adding reinforced doors to existing planes is costly and of dubious effectiveness for that reason.
OTOH, I don't see any reason plane being built now shouldn't have a reinforced, lockable cockpit door. But these things don't happen overnight.
I think other safety issues unrelated to terrorism would take precendent. What if there were a fire in the cockpit? What if the pilot has a heart attack? What if they ran out of peanuts? Ehmm.. Maybe not so much the last one, but you can see where I'm going with this.
Silliness aside, we might say that this scientist discovered the Kha-Nyou independently...
Well, no.. I don't think you could say even that. He found it at a market. It's obviously well known to the locals. Chances are there are even some Loatians in this country who have heard of it.
He never would have "discovered" it if they hadn't already. It's more like Columbus went to Norway, heard a story about Vinland, and decided to check it out on his way back to Spain.
The initial claim was that Apple could release a Linux iTunes client and remove any ligitimate reason to develop an alternative client. Even if they did, it would probably be an x86-only binary version, and so would be incompatible with anything that wasn't x86 Linux.
The counter point was that there would still be many other operating systems that don't have iTunes. There would still be developers willing to develop DRM-free clients for those OSes, either because they actually wanted to use iTunes, or simply as a pretense to break the DRM.
To stop all of them, using your logic, Apple would be forced to write a version of iTunes for every OS on the planet. Apple would be playing OS whack-a-mole, spending a lot of money writing code for a tiny user base that won't result in any new revenue.
There HAS to be a line in there. A board game engine that, when provided with specific input, can replicate Scrabble is bad according to you. Well, your computer, when provided with specific input (say, a Scrabble program), can replicate Scrabble as well. Are all computers in violation of Hasbro's IP?
Certainly, a program that requires trivial input (maybe the point values of the pieces) before allowing you to play Scrabble is a violation. But a computer definitely is not. There is a gray area where the judgement is decided by the tool's "common use" -- ala Napster. That's a pretty subjective judgement and it tends to favor the side with more lawyers.
I'm not about to suggest that IP protection is bad and must be done away with, but the law certainly needs to be reformed.
I know "proper english", and I knew at the time that I wasn't using it. I made the stylistic choice that nowadays sounds silly. Were I writing my master's thesis or a business proposal, I would reform the sentence to avoid the issue. I didn't think anyone would care, especially on Slashdot, where worse errors occur daily on the front page.
I set their macro security to medium, which does not disabling security. At the medium security level, if you open a spreadsheet with unsigned macros, Excel prompts you to enable or disable them for that sheet. IMO, that's not any less secure, so long as the user knows where the sheet came from. Microsoft didn't think it was much of a problem until XP, when they decided users were too stupid to make the decision themselves.
An in-house CA did cross my mind, but our IT guys are dicks/morons, and getting them to support it would be nigh impossible. Not to mention I don't work there anymore, so it's not my problem.
It's astonishing that you can do anything useful in it, let alone write a virus in it.
I spent a large part of my last job writing custom Excel applications in VBA. Most of them were for engineers who wanted an easy yet flexible way to input and summarize data. Excel provides an interface they're already familar with, and I provided a few bits of VBA code to make complicated tasks easy. Sure, I could have written a custom application for each task, but that would have been overkill, not to mention a waste of my time and my employer's money.
The virus writers started to piss me off when we switched to Office XP. XP automatically sets your macro security to maximum, and it became a big hassle to tell my users to lower their security. Anymore, they don't trust any macros, even from someone in the same company. (In anticipation of someone mentioning signed macros: setting up my cert on every computer is no easier than setting the macro security to medium.)
In fact, with all the poverty, institutionalized corruption, and a nuclear war in the making, some Indians are saying now that India was better off under British rule.
That's actually a good idea, and it seems like it would work. OTOH, it doesn't exempt you from Newton's Third Law. A motor, driven by a rotating magnetic field, creates torque which is applied to both the stator and rotor. The rotor transfers torque to the screw; the stator transfers torque to the space station.
Now, if there's a cordless screwdriver that doesn't deliver torque back onto the wielder, this is the solution.
You mean, if there's a screwdriver that defies the laws of physics? As you apply torque to the screw, it applies torque to you. There's no way around it.
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... for a comparable computer (yes, this means no leaving out wireless, firewire, and all of those things Mac users use and take for granted) ...
You guys just keep redefining "comparable" until you're right. Suppose I define "comparable" to mean that it has free expansion slots and available drive bays; you know, those things that PC users takes for granted. I can get that from Dell starting at $299. To get that from Apple, I have to pay at least $1499. Sure that $299 PC's a Celeron doorstop, but if we use my definition it makes me right. Spend a little more, even into the $400-500 range and you can get a pretty good computer, and they frequently have better computers on special.
You pay for what you get. You get a slick operating system and a fancy case. I get to keep more money in my wallet. Everyone's happy.
And if you don't like their prices -- don't buy a Mac. What? You want the full Mac experience but don't want to pay for it? So you want the full BMW M6 driving experience, but want to pay the cost of a Ford Focus? That's your problem, not Apple's (or BMW).
They charge a premium fee for the Apple brand and there's nothing wrong with that. The "Apple Experience", as others have dubbed it, is indeed worth the additional cost to many people. You compare Apple to BMW, yet BMW does the exact same thing; they charge more for a premium brand.
Apple sells hardware yes, but they don't just sell hardware. They sell the Apple experience.
Now, does it make more sense for Apple to sell that experience at $2000 a pop or at $100 a pop?
Apple sells computers with software that makes them unique and different than other computers. It gives them an edge over Dell and Gateway, who are their real competitors, not Microsoft. Switching to x86 lowers their cost, increases performance, and gives users the option to run Windows if they must. It makes sense. Letting other PCs run Mac OS, OTOH, destroys Apple's status as a premium brand will kill their hardware business.
I realize you really want to run OS X on your current box and the announcement has got you excited that it might happen, but it just isn't a sound business decision for Apple. I know what I'd want if I were an Apple shareholder - I'd want them to milk their premium brand, not give it away to their biggest competitors.
A simple Google search shows that while yes, on rare occaision some parts of India have reached 47-49 C, even 45 C was considered an "record heat wave" in 2002, whereas "normal" is considered 40-43. My hometown in California averages 37 throughout summer with peaks in the 40s and there are plenty others nearby who fair worse.
you know, it wasn't a dupe when I started writing it.. oh well
Wouldn't he cut out the middleman here (and thus, theoretically increase efficiency of the system) by simply leaving his freezer door open with a fan in front of it?
As others have pointed out, in order to cool the insides, your freezer produces heat that normally gets dissipated back into the room. If you leave the door open the freezer will have to work harder to cool a larger space, producing more heat, making it harder to cool. Your freezer not being anywhere close to 100% efficient, you will actually end up heating your room. (Not to mention sending your electric bill sky high.)
At my university, most lab/public computers are mostly open (except for those in the library.. weird). No anti-spyware/virus stuff AFIAK. Their most effective security measure is that nothing is committed to disk, so rebooting cures all. Locking down the computers for people who know what they're doing usually causes more problems than it solves, so they (partially) trust us.
Everyone these days has a USB memory stick, so there's always an accessible USB port. From said memory stick, you can run any software you'd like, including keyloggers. But if I couldn't run a keylogger, I couldn't run useful apps either. For example, I keep a copy of PuTTY on my stick and I'm able to SSH into my mainframe account and work on CS projects from anywhere on campus.
I'm sure the smart [h,cr]acker could easily gather lots of juicy information, but mostly I'm not worried. In a university environment people are usually there out of self-interest and aren't out to read your email. Sure I'm taking a chance, but the alternative is a certain pain in the ass. I'd much rather carry around a USB stick than a hulking laptop (or use a tiny laptop with a tiny keyboard and a tiny screen).
Is Maxim Magazine porn? I personally think it is. (defined: "Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.") Should Maxim have a plastic cover just because I think it's porn? Should we force Maxim Online to .xxx? Most of TV fits that definition too -- www.fox.xxx has a nice ring to it. (It really does. They should buy it just because.)
I'm serious here. I'm not just playing the devil's advocate. I honestly believe Maxim is porn. I know there are lots of people who disagree with me, notably the people who subscribe to or work for Maxim. I just don't see why my point of view, or anyone else's, has any business being enshrined in the law or forced upon others.
If Apple ports their OS to Intel, so that it can run on standard PC architecture, then they become an OS vendor ...
Which will not happen as long as Apple has anything to do with it. There's much more profit to be made selling $2000 computers than selling $100 software.
New Macs will have an Intel CPU. That's really all that's going to change. Mac OS will definitely not run on other computers, and I'll be very surprised if Windows runs right out of the box. You know there's going to be a ROM chip or some sort of proprietary hardware Macs have and PCs lack. Mac OS will require it and the chip will require Mac OS.
-For cameras whose RAW format is publicly available, start image processing from RAW. .bmp first and work from that.
-For cameras with undocumented RAW formats, convert to something like
Admittedly, I'm not a photographer or a graphic artist, but I'm a little confused as to how those are really any different. Chances are your image manipulation is done in Photoshop/GIMP/etc. If you use a Photoshop plugin, doesn't the plugin simply convert the RAW format internally? I assume Photoshop has some kind of standardized way of storing image data in memory so that it can be processed by the plugins and filters you want to use. The plugin's job* is to convert it to that format, which you might as well do outside of Photoshop.
Short of using a format-specific tool, it doesn't seem like there's any sort of image manipulation that would really benefit from the RAW format, because they all do an internal conversion anyway.
So someone, please educate me as to how a RAW plugin is any better than converting to lossless format first. It's not that I'm advocating that it isn't better, I just don't know.
From an engineering standpoint, I think Apple could have added a few extra cubic millimeters to the battery size (and overall size) without sacrificing anything in the overall design. This way they would have delivered a real-world 8 hours of battery life, could have advertised it and those 3 people that start it up and listen without skipping or any UI interaction would have gotten 15 hours.
You've got it backwards. As happens with many such devices, they likely decided on a size of the battery that will give them approximately the right battery life long before they could possibly know it exactly. Then you build the device, test to see how long the battery actually lasts under "normal conditions", and put that number in your marketing. What you're really asking for is a more demanding definition of "normal conditions", which is frankly a marketing decision, not an engineering one.
... I'm sure that a few carefully designed chips and software would enable a high level of functionality and low level of power consumption.
The only reason battery power hasn't become more of an issue is because that sort of thing has already happened. Scores of technical advances in the last few decades have dramatically reduced the power consumption of common hardware features. Unfortunately, marketing continues to demand that the design incorporate more features to compensate and smaller size. Laptops, cell phones, PDAs, etc. now get about the same battery life as they did years ago because every advance in efficiency is complemented by a smaller battery and more features.
No, they're pigeons.
No "little girl with a razor blade to her throat standing in a pool of her fathers blood."
As someone else pointed out, something very similar did happen in 1970. Except that rather than a little girl and her father, it was two flight attendents.
Granted, the situation ended "well" in the sense that the hijacker was ultimately stopped by air marshals, but one could imagine a much worse situation. For example, there still aren't any air marshals on many (most?) US domestic flights. Adding reinforced doors to existing planes is costly and of dubious effectiveness for that reason.
OTOH, I don't see any reason plane being built now shouldn't have a reinforced, lockable cockpit door. But these things don't happen overnight.
I think other safety issues unrelated to terrorism would take precendent. What if there were a fire in the cockpit? What if the pilot has a heart attack? What if they ran out of peanuts? Ehmm.. Maybe not so much the last one, but you can see where I'm going with this.
Silliness aside, we might say that this scientist discovered the Kha-Nyou independently ...
Well, no.. I don't think you could say even that. He found it at a market. It's obviously well known to the locals. Chances are there are even some Loatians in this country who have heard of it.
He never would have "discovered" it if they hadn't already. It's more like Columbus went to Norway, heard a story about Vinland, and decided to check it out on his way back to Spain.
The initial claim was that Apple could release a Linux iTunes client and remove any ligitimate reason to develop an alternative client. Even if they did, it would probably be an x86-only binary version, and so would be incompatible with anything that wasn't x86 Linux.
The counter point was that there would still be many other operating systems that don't have iTunes. There would still be developers willing to develop DRM-free clients for those OSes, either because they actually wanted to use iTunes, or simply as a pretense to break the DRM.
To stop all of them, using your logic, Apple would be forced to write a version of iTunes for every OS on the planet. Apple would be playing OS whack-a-mole, spending a lot of money writing code for a tiny user base that won't result in any new revenue.
There HAS to be a line in there. A board game engine that, when provided with specific input, can replicate Scrabble is bad according to you. Well, your computer, when provided with specific input (say, a Scrabble program), can replicate Scrabble as well. Are all computers in violation of Hasbro's IP?
Certainly, a program that requires trivial input (maybe the point values of the pieces) before allowing you to play Scrabble is a violation. But a computer definitely is not. There is a gray area where the judgement is decided by the tool's "common use" -- ala Napster. That's a pretty subjective judgement and it tends to favor the side with more lawyers.
I'm not about to suggest that IP protection is bad and must be done away with, but the law certainly needs to be reformed.
I know "proper english", and I knew at the time that I wasn't using it. I made the stylistic choice that nowadays sounds silly. Were I writing my master's thesis or a business proposal, I would reform the sentence to avoid the issue. I didn't think anyone would care, especially on Slashdot, where worse errors occur daily on the front page.
I set their macro security to medium, which does not disabling security. At the medium security level, if you open a spreadsheet with unsigned macros, Excel prompts you to enable or disable them for that sheet. IMO, that's not any less secure, so long as the user knows where the sheet came from. Microsoft didn't think it was much of a problem until XP, when they decided users were too stupid to make the decision themselves.
An in-house CA did cross my mind, but our IT guys are dicks/morons, and getting them to support it would be nigh impossible. Not to mention I don't work there anymore, so it's not my problem.
It's astonishing that you can do anything useful in it, let alone write a virus in it.
I spent a large part of my last job writing custom Excel applications in VBA. Most of them were for engineers who wanted an easy yet flexible way to input and summarize data. Excel provides an interface they're already familar with, and I provided a few bits of VBA code to make complicated tasks easy. Sure, I could have written a custom application for each task, but that would have been overkill, not to mention a waste of my time and my employer's money.
The virus writers started to piss me off when we switched to Office XP. XP automatically sets your macro security to maximum, and it became a big hassle to tell my users to lower their security. Anymore, they don't trust any macros, even from someone in the same company. (In anticipation of someone mentioning signed macros: setting up my cert on every computer is no easier than setting the macro security to medium.)
In fact, with all the poverty, institutionalized corruption, and a nuclear war in the making, some Indians are saying now that India was better off under British rule.
That's actually a good idea, and it seems like it would work. OTOH, it doesn't exempt you from Newton's Third Law. A motor, driven by a rotating magnetic field, creates torque which is applied to both the stator and rotor. The rotor transfers torque to the screw; the stator transfers torque to the space station.
Now, if there's a cordless screwdriver that doesn't deliver torque back onto the wielder, this is the solution.
You mean, if there's a screwdriver that defies the laws of physics? As you apply torque to the screw, it applies torque to you. There's no way around it.
Get it right, it's Lin(Annoyed Grunt)s.