Given that reasonably high resolution rotary encoders suitable for connection to computers have been cheap for ages(your mouse had two, back in the bad days, and the technology has only gotten better and cheaper since) and given that the computational power and memory capacity needed to emulate any turntable effect based on input from such encoder peripherals have also been cheap and accessible for a while, I stand by my "retro" theory of vinyl.
Yes, much of the contemporary popularity of vinyl is driven by the fact that you can manipulate playback quite precisely by hand; but it is culture, rather than technology, preventing rotary encoder peripherals and damage-proof software from eating that market alive.
I suspect that the question is not "Will there be java for OSX or not?"(given OSX's unixy guts, it would be simple to get one of the other unix JVMs going, along with full X11 graphics) but "Will Java on OSX make any effort at all at looking like a part of the Mac desktop?"
Both because it is pretty simple, and because there is no reason for Oracle to deny themselves that market share, Java will be available; but it would be totally standard for an "enterprise" software company to completely ignore the sort of aesthetics-driven purism that the Mac guys go nuts for. Getting an X11 graphics version of the JVM working on OSX could probably be done by the end of the week; but would find a home only among people who use Java first and OSX second.
Maintaining a full native-look-and-feel-warm-and-fuzzy-and-Aqua-supports-all-the-stuff-that-makes-the-Mac-guys-crazy-about-anything-that-smells-remotely-cross-platform would be a much more serious effort.
Given OSX's essentially unixy guts, it should be comparatively trivial to get one of the other unix java implementations going; but the Mac faithful are going to lose their shit if they have to endure X11.
I suspect that it is Game Over for Java as part of the "Mac" experience; but nothing barring the hypothetical cryptographic lockdown of the desktop mac will stop people from treating macs as unixy java dev environments that can also run word and photoshop if they want to.
Given that pretty much any player not sourced from 5 years ago or the bottom end of a flea market(and a few that were) will support one or more of FLAC, Apple Lossless, or WMA Lossless, your parenthetical statement seems like a rather glaring strawman.
There is nothing particularly technologically wrong with DAT, particularly given its origins in a time when tape was pretty much the only economically viable way of storing substantial quantities of data(DV/mini-DV is in a fairly similar boat); but comparing it to the very low end of contemporary audio players is basically meaningless(and doubly dishonest, since DAT based walkman units are markedly less common than conventional audiotape ones, and used pretty much only by the sort of market segment that wouldn't touch a 128kb CBR MP3 with somebody else's ears)
Obviously, lossy compression makes it trivial to make just about any mp3 player sound arbitrarily bad; but lossless compression and large internal memories are ubiquitous features on all but the cheapest modern units, making it pretty easy to get output limited only by the quality of the source material and the listening environment.
You seem to have mistaken java for something that lives exclusively inside little grey boxes in a browser window, and used to compete with Flash back in the 90's...
Further, while integration is definitely Apple's competitive thing, this is a story about them de-integrating a previously integrated technology. That is, they used to consider java part of their "just works" family, and now they have publicly announced that it is an unsupported "any other vendor" thing(It's not as though Cocoa is magically 'zero configuration' and Java isn't; it's just that Apple considers one to be a first-class aspect of their platform, and integrates accordingly, while they consider the other to be peripheral, and shove it into the cold accordingly).
It is precisely because integration is Apple's thing that their de-integrating a given technology is such a serious matter. That's sort of the entire point of the article.
Given that the further you get from the UI, the more unixlike OSX is, I'd be shocked if one of the existing linux or unix JVMs isn't being run successfully on OSX by the week's end(assuming that there isn't already one in fink, I haven't bothered to check). On the other hand, one that looks at home in Aqua, rather than being X11/headless only may well take a while, or never, to materialize. Apple has very clearly announced that they don't care, and it would not surprise me if Oracle and their cadre of enterprise customers don't consider fighting the battle for (visible) java on the mac desktop to be worth their money.
It is clear that Apple very much intends to kick java off the island in terms of it being part of "OSX" in the sense of "What people think of when they boot up and use a mac". However, given that their support for nominally-included-but-3rd-party tools, languages, servers, etc. has always been pretty tepid(generally out of date, often rather disjoint from their pretty graphical config tools unless you step in careful and limited directions, god help you if you try to maintain the current version from other source, etc.) that seems thoroughly unsurprising.
They won't(yet) stop you from treating OSX as you would a Unix server/workstation; but their disinterested contempt is palpable.
I'm not surprised at the long persistence of tape, in general; but of Sony's persistence in the market.
Even though the cost of a gig of flash and some cheapass SoiC may well have fallen below the cost of a tape transport, that only really helps in an environment where computers with which to load and reload the resultant low-end mp3 player are ubiquitous. Tape, while it imposes higher fixed costs on the player, allows extremely cheaply duplicated cassettes to be sold and swapped(and unlike cheap optical transports, tape is writable).
However, even if there is still a case for tape, it has only applied in some pretty downmarket areas. In the first world, wearing a tape-player in public is practically a diagnostic signal of mental illness, now, that's how downmarket they are. For Sony, a company that prefers higher margin niches, it seems like a very odd place to be. I'll be genuinely suprised when the last cheap-n'-nearly-anonymous Chinese OEM stops making the things; but I would have expected Sony to leave the area some time ago. Perhaps their brand is still worth enough that they figured they could make some money stamping it on devices produced by somebody else, and keeping a few pennies of the premium it commanded over identical goods by lesser names?
I suspect that there are two phenomena at work, actually seen all over when it comes to deprecation of technology:
1. Some formats/technologies are inferior even at the time they were made, but justified by the compromises of the time. In this case, analog cassette tape was relatively low-fi(gradually improved, but wow and flutter really sucked), had to be rewound, and was vulnerable to tape-chewing incidents. Even at the time, it was justified against reel-to-reel only by cost and portability(nice thing about tape is, for all its vices, you can always make it better just by making it bigger) and was at best sonically even with vinyl, but again smaller and cheaper. People who are into 'retro-chic' tech are rather less likely to latch onto the compromise tech, unless the good stuff was so wildly expensive that it remains unreachable to them to this day.
2. The 'futuristic'-'contemporary'-'obsolete'-'retro'-antique' progression: As a technology ages, its appeal changes in a rather nonlinear way. During the 'futuristic' stage, it is lustworthy; but either absurdly expensive or not actually ready for the real world. High mindshare; but zero marketshare. The 'contemporary' phase marks the peak of a technology's marketshare, when it is the basis of the vast majority of whatever systems it is relevant to; but this actually weakens its appeal. People might value what it does; but it is common to the point of banality. 'Obsolete' is the nadir of something's appeal. Marketshare is still quite high, albeit with gradually declining install base; but it is perceived as actively inferior to whatever has become 'contemporary'. It is often still architecturally similar, so it has no exotic appeal; but is worse, slower, uglier, whatever. A wintel from 1995 would qualify. Architecturally, it is nearly identical to one of today, only worse in basically every respect. 'Retro' is a stage that only some technologies every achieve. Here, the technology has become sufficiently alien from whatever is 'contemporary' that its flaws and quirks are seen as charming, rather than directly compared against the present, and any unique advantages it had have rabid fanboys. Things like record players, c64s, anything BeOS(retrocomputing in general, really), are here. 'Antique' is somewhat similar to retro; but applies to technologies so old or esoteric that they have basically fallen out of the market. Only a few hardcore specialists or obscure hobbyists have them, production is either artisanal or nonexistent, and so forth. Edison cylinder machines, difference engines, Thinking Machines systems, and the like qualify.
Tape is a poor contender on both points. Even during its time of greatest popularity, it was always the poor cousin to something cooler; but either more expensive or less portable. It also seems to have missed out on 'retro'(with the very limited exception of being a useful source for found-sound artists/musicians of various sorts); but still has decades to go before it has a shot at being antique.
Ordinarily, their would be praise in the streets for Apple "deprecating" Java. They've done a consistently late and shitty job of keeping their port up to date, with only the benefit of having it be part of "system update" to show for it.
Given that their marketshare has grown, and Sun/Oracle does a decent and/or better than Apple did job of keeping it updated for other supported platforms, it seems likely that support will actually improve.
However, in the case of Apple, it isn't hard (or, typically, incorrect) to view anything that they do as being in service of their single-vendor-golden-cage control freak ideology. On the mobile, it is cryptographically enforced. On the desktop, the intent seems fairly clear to start with the soft sell "The Apple Store isn't the only way, just the best one" saith Jobs, and abrupt terminations of distribution of 3rd party technology are likely part of that.
Server/corporate users of OSX, rare but not nonexistent beasts, should be celebrating right now, since they'll now have actual Java, not Apple half-assery; but it is also likely the case that this is an attempt to make java an even more obscure and peripheral aspect of the OSX experience in general(in the same way that x11 is available; but is considered about as "un-Apple" as firing up Parallels, and probably less common).
I'd suspect that it is a mixture of things. Obviously, insurers want to refine their models so that absolutely everyone is paying their exact actuarial cost + profit; but they also have an interest in the safety of their clients in less severe circumstances. If there are cheap; but not necessarily obvious, things that can be done to decrease costs in more minor circumstances, it is mutually beneficial for insurance companies to offer an incentive of part of their expected savings to their clients. The insurance company makes money; because they don't pass on all the savings brought about by the modification. The customer wins because they get some of the savings and they might avoid the hassle of having their house damaged(even with 100% insurance cover, major water damage/destruction is a huge pain in the ass).
For any class of insurance where there is a continuum of events with various degrees of badness and avoidability, insurers are unlikely to lose much business by assisting their clients in being safer(ie: getting and using a gym membership will make me healthier; but I can't drop my health insurance because if I get cancer, I'd be totally fucked). However, they can often save money, by reducing claims paid for more minor issues, by assisting their clients with those more minor risks.
In this case, for example, most people really can't afford to lose their house and most of the stuff inside it. It would just be catastrophic. So, unless they are very poor, or live in a flood/fire zone where some federal "emergency" welfare-for-the-wealthy program rebuilds million+ houses each time they get wiped out, they will be carrying insurance on their homes. If there are simple things that can be done to make homes less vulnerable to common events(ie. low category storms, fires caused by lousy wiring) it is very much in the insurer's interest to encourage policyholders to make changes that ameliorate those risks, while still keeping them on the policy rolls with terrifying predictions of category 5 storms and catastrophic house fires.
If it turns out, for example, that(as in TFA's video) a building becomes much more vulnerable once its door blows open, that suggests a variety of retrofits in the "few hundred in materials and labor" category that could easily save tens of thousands in the event of a modest storm. Insurers would love to know about stuff like that, so they can offer you some percentage of their expected savings to have that done. Exactly the same way that health insurers commonly subsidize gym memberships and healthy eating tips and stuff. They know that you aren't leaving; because that 500k cancer could hit at any time; but they know that both of you will be better off if your fat ass doesn't end up with type II diabetes.
It does seem a very odd description, more likely to have crawled out of somebody's imagination than the numbers; but my understanding is that wind speeds vary a great deal under tornado conditions, which means that it is probably accurate, albeit in a way that is either irrelevant or actively misleading.
The actual cone of the tornado is extremely fast, quite powerful, and is where all the crazy stuff happens(large objects being lifted, spare I-beams getting shoved neatly through trees, etc.) Surrounding that is an area of air disturbance, with strength decreasing as you get further out.
Conveniently, Universal adopted a clever scheme to dodge that by not being the copyright owner... (which, of course, should make them even more culpable; but somehow that little bit of symmetry seems to be missing in practice)
Humanities faculty are really far down the list when it comes to political influence. If anything, well below the scientists(scientists may bring bad news about heavy metal toxicity, the nonexistence of baby jesus, and the feasibility of producing a live sharktopus; but even the groups that hate their guts for that tend to need them. Modern industry depends heavily on applied science; contemporary religious apologetics are often all about reconciling empirical realities with scriptural claims, and the greens tend to have their ecologists and whatnot.)
The only threat to science that university environments have managed at all recently is a dash of animal-rights terrorism against researchers in relevant fields.
Outside of a few backwards hellholes, I'm pretty sure that communism as a threat to empiricism is dead and buried. I'm sure that North Korea thinks that crops evolve because Dear Leader wishes them to; but that isn't exactly a problem for canadian scientists.
Depending on your region, businesses that absolutely hate any environmental, product safety, or occupational health regulations; Jesus freaks/ Allah enthusiasts/ Torah bashers with major hang-ups on biology, cosmology, and sex; or the occasional ultra-green who insists that any human activity is a threat to mother gaia(outside of a few pockets of Europe, these guys are playing a distant third), are really the present threats of note.
There are also the jackbooted drug warriors, who could really use a course in comparative risk assessment; but precisely their weakness in that area makes them a very single-issue threat to scientific policymaking.
Depends on your context: for a user-facing computer, that is pretty much true. If X pukes itself, taking my graphical programs with it(or even if my browser pukes itself, taking my tabs with it) I might as well have rebooted the computer for all the inconvenience I've just been put to. There are even a few situations where(without good design) non-volatile memory could make things worse: today, if some peripheral gets confused and its internal processor stops talking, or starts talking nonsense to the outside world, you just cut the power. Unless it has been doing something unsafe, like a firmware update, it'll be fine when it comes back up. If it is nonvolatile, it'll be just as confused as when it went down. You'll need either markedly better firmware teams, or explicitly "state-flush" watchdogs or you'll be RMAing Wifi and graphics cards like there's no tomorrow.
On the other hand, if I'm running a really low power system(not a "cry for me, I have to run off batteries" low power, more like "I have to run off a piezoelectric device catching vibrations" or "I have to run off a blood glucose fuel cell" low power), the ability to seamlessly drift between sleeping and waking, in milliseconds, would come in pretty handy.
On a more consumer-relevant scale, laptops and phones that have a standby time limited only by the self-discharge rate of their battery chemistry would be nice, as would desktops for which "suspend" replaces "off" and "flush state" is a special error correction function only, rather than the default "off" state.
On the server side, rapid supply scaling would be much easier if you could just keep the NIC alive and active(to skip DHCP, which takes a second or two); but able to wake the entire rest of the box, running the hypervisor or server of choice and ready to start handling requests in under a second. The NIC code, and whatever code(hypervisor or kernel) that manages the VMs or server instances would have to be rock solid; but you could kill and restart individual VMs and server instances as needed, and those would presumably be where most of the complexity lives.
While this technology sounds quite interesting and(assuming it pans out outside the lab) will definitely shake up the world of tiny embedded devices, smart dusts, bridge bolts that you can set SNMP traps on, etc. it will be very interesting to see whether or not, and how quickly, it shakes up the world of "computers" in the more or less conventional "you sit in front of it and type at the intertubes" sense.
For years now, we've had computers that can(albeit by much lower tech means) be said to have "non volatile memory". Every cheap-shit laptop out there can keep its RAM contents alive for at least 24 hours on a half-full battery, and most desktops can do the same until a brownout or blackout hits, which isn't often in much of the world. It's a brute force approach, the RAM isn't actually non-volatile; but from the user experience perspective it might as well be(with the exception of the fact that a laptop on standby will eventually eat its battery, while a truly nonvolatile one would only self-discharge at the natural rate for Li-Ion cells).
And yet, people spend a lot of time booting computers, and even bringing them out of sleep tends to take several seconds, between spinning up drives, waiting for various devices(which are almost all computers in their own right, these days) to settle and start talking on various busses, checking IPs and DHCP leases on one or more wired and/or wireless connections, etc.
I have to wonder if, outside of systems built, from the ground up, logic and software, for truly nonvolatile operation, how much of a difference this will actually make for computers large enough that we think of them as such(as said initially, nonvolatile logic/state will rock the world of truly low-power embedded stuff). Particularly with the emphasis on network connectivity in most modern applications, your computer/device is often only modestly useful until it has finished negotiating with whatever sort of network it connects to. Even if it can go from off to on in a millisecond or less, DHCP, if ethernet, authentication+DHCP, if wifi, and whatever freaky stuff has to happen for various cellular services takes time, sometimes 10s of seconds. Either you leave your NICs on all the time, or you eat that delay. Not to mention the (rarer than they used to be; but still occasionally seen) pathological cases of peripherals that just get confused or, more commonly, just don't come out of sleep quite right. Wifi devices and graphics cards seem to be the worst, but if you take a large sample set of laptops and sleep and wake them often enough, you'll see all kinds of weird waking-on-the-very-wrong-side-of-the-bed behavior. Worse with really cheap and nasty peripherals, or drivers based on reverse-engineering and vendor hostility; but happens occasionally even on the oh-so-integrated macs. Currently, a reboot, or a hard power cut/battery removal at worst, will always flush state and sort them out; but truly nonvolatile devices will either have to be a great deal better engineered and more reliable, or include some sort of watchdog that can forcibly flush the state of a malfunctioning device...
Y'know what's worse than the size? The image it conjures up: Bees are eusocial insects, living in a colony of sterile females, presided over by a breeding queen and a few drones who are born to mate with the queen and then die.
Imagining Larry Ellison as the Queen of Oracle, breeding with a revolving door set of board members in order to give birth to every employee, enforcing his leadership by pheremonal signals, is not a recipe for sweet dreams...
Unfortunately, I can't help you there. We were rather underutilizing the sharepoint setup, as little more than a glorified shared drive, only with more annoying complexity.
That, combined with the fact that virtually all the document production of the department is lightly formatted near-plaintext technical documentation, with the occasional screenshot and hyperlink, also had a lot to do with making the pitch successful. Had we been 100% behind sharepoint at the time, it almost certainly would have failed. However, since we weren't putting too much effort into gettting the most out of any document management setup, I was able to sell the wiki(ended up being dokuwiki, I think) as a great "80/20 solution". Sharepoint would give you more features(and I freely acknowledged that); but required a greater level of work and buy-in than the department was giving it. The wiki would give us 80ish% of the benefits for 20% of the effort.
So far, that has been largely true. For a department of our size, the wiki lives on a tiny little VM, not consuming any CALs or licences or anything, gives us versioning and attribution for the mostly plaintext documentation/links/screenshots stuff, and supports links to an SMB share where we can store installers and documents that absolutely have to be in Word, and so forth.
Not quite as seamless; but it was fast, easy, and cheap. The fact that I could go from "nothing" to "full demo" in a little bit of spare time just helped drive that home.
Depending on corporate culture(and the exact policies RE: demos of the proprietary vendor) cost can actually be a huge factor; but not for the obvious "cheap=better" reason.
In some institutional cultures there is a surprising power(assuming you don't step on the wrong toes) in Just Fucking Doing It. Obviously, unless you have really impressive guts and not too much sense, this doesn't mean putting a production server on an internet facing IP and hacking the company's DNS records to point to it; but showing up with a solid, functioning demo that everyone can gather around the projector and poke around at on their laptops can really sell something.
If a proprietary product isn't either available as a free demo version, and not through some subscription program you have to sign up for, or so expensive that the company will send a guy in a nice suit to do the demo, hand out some swag, and give everyone a really nice handshake, doing that with a proprietary product is hard and/or illegal.
Doing it with a FOSS(or freeware, admittedly) product is easy. You just throw something together in a VM and show it off.
That was my experience when I was trying to convince my employer to drop sharepoint for a wiki. They weren't turned off by the cost of sharepoint; but the fact that I was able to ask my boss for some time at one of our department meetings, get behind the projector and say "Hey, I threw this demo together in a weekend and put in some example content so you can get an idea of how we would use it. Easy web interface, versioning, strong ability to create links between otherwise disparate pieces of technical knowledge, check it out at $INTERNAL_IP..." Everyone pulled out their laptops, poked around a bit, there was some discussion, and the boss green-lighted it.
Had I given a speech about how we had to, like, fight the proprietary power, man, it would have gone nowhere. However, being able to just sit down, turn on, and show off, all without any serious backing or funding(because everything was free) allowed me to go from "nothing" to "green light-full production status".
"Free" never entered into it in a hard financial way. However, had it not been free, I couldn't have done what I did. Now, Anecdote doesn't equal data, much less proof; but it is something to consider.
I think that your hypothesis has merit, in the sense that Google Docs is probably a bigger longterm threat(particularly to home user sales: once a corporation buys a bunch of sharepoint licenses, I suspect MS stops worrying); but I'm not sure that releasing this video will be much of a strike against Google Docs.
Google's Docs thrust seems to be coming in two directions: one is the casual user pitch, by subtly linking it to their other offerings("view as HTML" for PDF results in a google search is now called "quick view" and, once clicked, dumps you into Google Docs, rather than the old static HTML version. Similar linkages are to be found in Gmail and so forth). I suspect that this will be fairly effective, particularly since Google Docs(while it doesn't even try to go toe-to-toe with Office's feature list, has a few absolutely killer features for casual users: Anyone who isn't a gearhead or a cube drone with a good IT team has historically been without both document versioning and an offsite backup. Docs gives you both, for free, relatively intuitively). The sort of people who are brought in by this pitch probably won't even see this MS video, or know of its existence. They might be brought into Microsoft's "Live" camp by MS doing similar linking to Hotmail; but that pretty much depends on which email service they've been using for years now.
The video might have more value against Google's second pitch direction, the "$COMPANY_AND_OR_STATE_ENTITY Has Gone Google" advertisements, which are explicitly aimed at getting organizations to switch. Here again, Microsoft is probably pretty safe from Google among their giant corporate customers, since(if you buy enough add-ons, server products, and IT support) you can already get all the features of Office, plus things like versioning, backup, and availability on any computer in an enterprise; but any company/organization that was seriously using OpenOffice is much more likely to not be wedded to Microsoft to nearly that extent. They could, easily enough, say "OpenOffice is kind of a hassle; but the sticker shock on a proper Office deployment is killing me. Hey, Google has something that costs about as much, per year, as I spend at starbucks in a month, and nothing to install. Interesting..."
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the dutch know how obscene their system of sea-walls is?
Given that reasonably high resolution rotary encoders suitable for connection to computers have been cheap for ages(your mouse had two, back in the bad days, and the technology has only gotten better and cheaper since) and given that the computational power and memory capacity needed to emulate any turntable effect based on input from such encoder peripherals have also been cheap and accessible for a while, I stand by my "retro" theory of vinyl.
Yes, much of the contemporary popularity of vinyl is driven by the fact that you can manipulate playback quite precisely by hand; but it is culture, rather than technology, preventing rotary encoder peripherals and damage-proof software from eating that market alive.
I suspect that the question is not "Will there be java for OSX or not?"(given OSX's unixy guts, it would be simple to get one of the other unix JVMs going, along with full X11 graphics) but "Will Java on OSX make any effort at all at looking like a part of the Mac desktop?"
Both because it is pretty simple, and because there is no reason for Oracle to deny themselves that market share, Java will be available; but it would be totally standard for an "enterprise" software company to completely ignore the sort of aesthetics-driven purism that the Mac guys go nuts for. Getting an X11 graphics version of the JVM working on OSX could probably be done by the end of the week; but would find a home only among people who use Java first and OSX second.
Maintaining a full native-look-and-feel-warm-and-fuzzy-and-Aqua-supports-all-the-stuff-that-makes-the-Mac-guys-crazy-about-anything-that-smells-remotely-cross-platform would be a much more serious effort.
Given OSX's essentially unixy guts, it should be comparatively trivial to get one of the other unix java implementations going; but the Mac faithful are going to lose their shit if they have to endure X11.
I suspect that it is Game Over for Java as part of the "Mac" experience; but nothing barring the hypothetical cryptographic lockdown of the desktop mac will stop people from treating macs as unixy java dev environments that can also run word and photoshop if they want to.
Luckily, now that all maps are hosted and controlled by Blizzard, they could change that.
Given that pretty much any player not sourced from 5 years ago or the bottom end of a flea market(and a few that were) will support one or more of FLAC, Apple Lossless, or WMA Lossless, your parenthetical statement seems like a rather glaring strawman.
There is nothing particularly technologically wrong with DAT, particularly given its origins in a time when tape was pretty much the only economically viable way of storing substantial quantities of data(DV/mini-DV is in a fairly similar boat); but comparing it to the very low end of contemporary audio players is basically meaningless(and doubly dishonest, since DAT based walkman units are markedly less common than conventional audiotape ones, and used pretty much only by the sort of market segment that wouldn't touch a 128kb CBR MP3 with somebody else's ears)
Obviously, lossy compression makes it trivial to make just about any mp3 player sound arbitrarily bad; but lossless compression and large internal memories are ubiquitous features on all but the cheapest modern units, making it pretty easy to get output limited only by the quality of the source material and the listening environment.
You seem to have mistaken java for something that lives exclusively inside little grey boxes in a browser window, and used to compete with Flash back in the 90's...
Further, while integration is definitely Apple's competitive thing, this is a story about them de-integrating a previously integrated technology. That is, they used to consider java part of their "just works" family, and now they have publicly announced that it is an unsupported "any other vendor" thing(It's not as though Cocoa is magically 'zero configuration' and Java isn't; it's just that Apple considers one to be a first-class aspect of their platform, and integrates accordingly, while they consider the other to be peripheral, and shove it into the cold accordingly).
It is precisely because integration is Apple's thing that their de-integrating a given technology is such a serious matter. That's sort of the entire point of the article.
Given that the further you get from the UI, the more unixlike OSX is, I'd be shocked if one of the existing linux or unix JVMs isn't being run successfully on OSX by the week's end(assuming that there isn't already one in fink, I haven't bothered to check). On the other hand, one that looks at home in Aqua, rather than being X11/headless only may well take a while, or never, to materialize. Apple has very clearly announced that they don't care, and it would not surprise me if Oracle and their cadre of enterprise customers don't consider fighting the battle for (visible) java on the mac desktop to be worth their money.
It is clear that Apple very much intends to kick java off the island in terms of it being part of "OSX" in the sense of "What people think of when they boot up and use a mac". However, given that their support for nominally-included-but-3rd-party tools, languages, servers, etc. has always been pretty tepid(generally out of date, often rather disjoint from their pretty graphical config tools unless you step in careful and limited directions, god help you if you try to maintain the current version from other source, etc.) that seems thoroughly unsurprising.
They won't(yet) stop you from treating OSX as you would a Unix server/workstation; but their disinterested contempt is palpable.
I'm not surprised at the long persistence of tape, in general; but of Sony's persistence in the market.
Even though the cost of a gig of flash and some cheapass SoiC may well have fallen below the cost of a tape transport, that only really helps in an environment where computers with which to load and reload the resultant low-end mp3 player are ubiquitous. Tape, while it imposes higher fixed costs on the player, allows extremely cheaply duplicated cassettes to be sold and swapped(and unlike cheap optical transports, tape is writable).
However, even if there is still a case for tape, it has only applied in some pretty downmarket areas. In the first world, wearing a tape-player in public is practically a diagnostic signal of mental illness, now, that's how downmarket they are. For Sony, a company that prefers higher margin niches, it seems like a very odd place to be. I'll be genuinely suprised when the last cheap-n'-nearly-anonymous Chinese OEM stops making the things; but I would have expected Sony to leave the area some time ago. Perhaps their brand is still worth enough that they figured they could make some money stamping it on devices produced by somebody else, and keeping a few pennies of the premium it commanded over identical goods by lesser names?
I suspect that there are two phenomena at work, actually seen all over when it comes to deprecation of technology:
1. Some formats/technologies are inferior even at the time they were made, but justified by the compromises of the time. In this case, analog cassette tape was relatively low-fi(gradually improved, but wow and flutter really sucked), had to be rewound, and was vulnerable to tape-chewing incidents. Even at the time, it was justified against reel-to-reel only by cost and portability(nice thing about tape is, for all its vices, you can always make it better just by making it bigger) and was at best sonically even with vinyl, but again smaller and cheaper. People who are into 'retro-chic' tech are rather less likely to latch onto the compromise tech, unless the good stuff was so wildly expensive that it remains unreachable to them to this day.
2. The 'futuristic'-'contemporary'-'obsolete'-'retro'-antique' progression: As a technology ages, its appeal changes in a rather nonlinear way. During the 'futuristic' stage, it is lustworthy; but either absurdly expensive or not actually ready for the real world. High mindshare; but zero marketshare. The 'contemporary' phase marks the peak of a technology's marketshare, when it is the basis of the vast majority of whatever systems it is relevant to; but this actually weakens its appeal. People might value what it does; but it is common to the point of banality. 'Obsolete' is the nadir of something's appeal. Marketshare is still quite high, albeit with gradually declining install base; but it is perceived as actively inferior to whatever has become 'contemporary'. It is often still architecturally similar, so it has no exotic appeal; but is worse, slower, uglier, whatever. A wintel from 1995 would qualify. Architecturally, it is nearly identical to one of today, only worse in basically every respect. 'Retro' is a stage that only some technologies every achieve. Here, the technology has become sufficiently alien from whatever is 'contemporary' that its flaws and quirks are seen as charming, rather than directly compared against the present, and any unique advantages it had have rabid fanboys. Things like record players, c64s, anything BeOS(retrocomputing in general, really), are here. 'Antique' is somewhat similar to retro; but applies to technologies so old or esoteric that they have basically fallen out of the market. Only a few hardcore specialists or obscure hobbyists have them, production is either artisanal or nonexistent, and so forth. Edison cylinder machines, difference engines, Thinking Machines systems, and the like qualify.
Tape is a poor contender on both points. Even during its time of greatest popularity, it was always the poor cousin to something cooler; but either more expensive or less portable. It also seems to have missed out on 'retro'(with the very limited exception of being a useful source for found-sound artists/musicians of various sorts); but still has decades to go before it has a shot at being antique.
Ordinarily, their would be praise in the streets for Apple "deprecating" Java. They've done a consistently late and shitty job of keeping their port up to date, with only the benefit of having it be part of "system update" to show for it.
Given that their marketshare has grown, and Sun/Oracle does a decent and/or better than Apple did job of keeping it updated for other supported platforms, it seems likely that support will actually improve.
However, in the case of Apple, it isn't hard (or, typically, incorrect) to view anything that they do as being in service of their single-vendor-golden-cage control freak ideology. On the mobile, it is cryptographically enforced. On the desktop, the intent seems fairly clear to start with the soft sell "The Apple Store isn't the only way, just the best one" saith Jobs, and abrupt terminations of distribution of 3rd party technology are likely part of that.
Server/corporate users of OSX, rare but not nonexistent beasts, should be celebrating right now, since they'll now have actual Java, not Apple half-assery; but it is also likely the case that this is an attempt to make java an even more obscure and peripheral aspect of the OSX experience in general(in the same way that x11 is available; but is considered about as "un-Apple" as firing up Parallels, and probably less common).
But did your co-worker make that comment in force 7 Gaelic? Bloody incomprehensible, that stuff.
I'd suspect that it is a mixture of things. Obviously, insurers want to refine their models so that absolutely everyone is paying their exact actuarial cost + profit; but they also have an interest in the safety of their clients in less severe circumstances. If there are cheap; but not necessarily obvious, things that can be done to decrease costs in more minor circumstances, it is mutually beneficial for insurance companies to offer an incentive of part of their expected savings to their clients. The insurance company makes money; because they don't pass on all the savings brought about by the modification. The customer wins because they get some of the savings and they might avoid the hassle of having their house damaged(even with 100% insurance cover, major water damage/destruction is a huge pain in the ass).
For any class of insurance where there is a continuum of events with various degrees of badness and avoidability, insurers are unlikely to lose much business by assisting their clients in being safer(ie: getting and using a gym membership will make me healthier; but I can't drop my health insurance because if I get cancer, I'd be totally fucked). However, they can often save money, by reducing claims paid for more minor issues, by assisting their clients with those more minor risks.
In this case, for example, most people really can't afford to lose their house and most of the stuff inside it. It would just be catastrophic. So, unless they are very poor, or live in a flood/fire zone where some federal "emergency" welfare-for-the-wealthy program rebuilds million+ houses each time they get wiped out, they will be carrying insurance on their homes. If there are simple things that can be done to make homes less vulnerable to common events(ie. low category storms, fires caused by lousy wiring) it is very much in the insurer's interest to encourage policyholders to make changes that ameliorate those risks, while still keeping them on the policy rolls with terrifying predictions of category 5 storms and catastrophic house fires.
If it turns out, for example, that(as in TFA's video) a building becomes much more vulnerable once its door blows open, that suggests a variety of retrofits in the "few hundred in materials and labor" category that could easily save tens of thousands in the event of a modest storm. Insurers would love to know about stuff like that, so they can offer you some percentage of their expected savings to have that done. Exactly the same way that health insurers commonly subsidize gym memberships and healthy eating tips and stuff. They know that you aren't leaving; because that 500k cancer could hit at any time; but they know that both of you will be better off if your fat ass doesn't end up with type II diabetes.
It does seem a very odd description, more likely to have crawled out of somebody's imagination than the numbers; but my understanding is that wind speeds vary a great deal under tornado conditions, which means that it is probably accurate, albeit in a way that is either irrelevant or actively misleading.
The actual cone of the tornado is extremely fast, quite powerful, and is where all the crazy stuff happens(large objects being lifted, spare I-beams getting shoved neatly through trees, etc.) Surrounding that is an area of air disturbance, with strength decreasing as you get further out.
Conveniently, Universal adopted a clever scheme to dodge that by not being the copyright owner... (which, of course, should make them even more culpable; but somehow that little bit of symmetry seems to be missing in practice)
And this is a threat to empiricism how exactly?
Humanities faculty are really far down the list when it comes to political influence. If anything, well below the scientists(scientists may bring bad news about heavy metal toxicity, the nonexistence of baby jesus, and the feasibility of producing a live sharktopus; but even the groups that hate their guts for that tend to need them. Modern industry depends heavily on applied science; contemporary religious apologetics are often all about reconciling empirical realities with scriptural claims, and the greens tend to have their ecologists and whatnot.)
The only threat to science that university environments have managed at all recently is a dash of animal-rights terrorism against researchers in relevant fields.
Outside of a few backwards hellholes, I'm pretty sure that communism as a threat to empiricism is dead and buried. I'm sure that North Korea thinks that crops evolve because Dear Leader wishes them to; but that isn't exactly a problem for canadian scientists.
Depending on your region, businesses that absolutely hate any environmental, product safety, or occupational health regulations; Jesus freaks/ Allah enthusiasts/ Torah bashers with major hang-ups on biology, cosmology, and sex; or the occasional ultra-green who insists that any human activity is a threat to mother gaia(outside of a few pockets of Europe, these guys are playing a distant third), are really the present threats of note.
There are also the jackbooted drug warriors, who could really use a course in comparative risk assessment; but precisely their weakness in that area makes them a very single-issue threat to scientific policymaking.
He does; but all that exposure to non-hazardous asbestos has left him needing to speak slowly and breath out of his good lung...
Clubs are a hotbed of illegal drug use, of course they are going to harm baby seals...
Depends on your context: for a user-facing computer, that is pretty much true. If X pukes itself, taking my graphical programs with it(or even if my browser pukes itself, taking my tabs with it) I might as well have rebooted the computer for all the inconvenience I've just been put to. There are even a few situations where(without good design) non-volatile memory could make things worse: today, if some peripheral gets confused and its internal processor stops talking, or starts talking nonsense to the outside world, you just cut the power. Unless it has been doing something unsafe, like a firmware update, it'll be fine when it comes back up. If it is nonvolatile, it'll be just as confused as when it went down. You'll need either markedly better firmware teams, or explicitly "state-flush" watchdogs or you'll be RMAing Wifi and graphics cards like there's no tomorrow.
On the other hand, if I'm running a really low power system(not a "cry for me, I have to run off batteries" low power, more like "I have to run off a piezoelectric device catching vibrations" or "I have to run off a blood glucose fuel cell" low power), the ability to seamlessly drift between sleeping and waking, in milliseconds, would come in pretty handy.
On a more consumer-relevant scale, laptops and phones that have a standby time limited only by the self-discharge rate of their battery chemistry would be nice, as would desktops for which "suspend" replaces "off" and "flush state" is a special error correction function only, rather than the default "off" state.
On the server side, rapid supply scaling would be much easier if you could just keep the NIC alive and active(to skip DHCP, which takes a second or two); but able to wake the entire rest of the box, running the hypervisor or server of choice and ready to start handling requests in under a second. The NIC code, and whatever code(hypervisor or kernel) that manages the VMs or server instances would have to be rock solid; but you could kill and restart individual VMs and server instances as needed, and those would presumably be where most of the complexity lives.
While this technology sounds quite interesting and(assuming it pans out outside the lab) will definitely shake up the world of tiny embedded devices, smart dusts, bridge bolts that you can set SNMP traps on, etc. it will be very interesting to see whether or not, and how quickly, it shakes up the world of "computers" in the more or less conventional "you sit in front of it and type at the intertubes" sense.
For years now, we've had computers that can(albeit by much lower tech means) be said to have "non volatile memory". Every cheap-shit laptop out there can keep its RAM contents alive for at least 24 hours on a half-full battery, and most desktops can do the same until a brownout or blackout hits, which isn't often in much of the world. It's a brute force approach, the RAM isn't actually non-volatile; but from the user experience perspective it might as well be(with the exception of the fact that a laptop on standby will eventually eat its battery, while a truly nonvolatile one would only self-discharge at the natural rate for Li-Ion cells).
And yet, people spend a lot of time booting computers, and even bringing them out of sleep tends to take several seconds, between spinning up drives, waiting for various devices(which are almost all computers in their own right, these days) to settle and start talking on various busses, checking IPs and DHCP leases on one or more wired and/or wireless connections, etc.
I have to wonder if, outside of systems built, from the ground up, logic and software, for truly nonvolatile operation, how much of a difference this will actually make for computers large enough that we think of them as such(as said initially, nonvolatile logic/state will rock the world of truly low-power embedded stuff). Particularly with the emphasis on network connectivity in most modern applications, your computer/device is often only modestly useful until it has finished negotiating with whatever sort of network it connects to. Even if it can go from off to on in a millisecond or less, DHCP, if ethernet, authentication+DHCP, if wifi, and whatever freaky stuff has to happen for various cellular services takes time, sometimes 10s of seconds. Either you leave your NICs on all the time, or you eat that delay. Not to mention the (rarer than they used to be; but still occasionally seen) pathological cases of peripherals that just get confused or, more commonly, just don't come out of sleep quite right. Wifi devices and graphics cards seem to be the worst, but if you take a large sample set of laptops and sleep and wake them often enough, you'll see all kinds of weird waking-on-the-very-wrong-side-of-the-bed behavior. Worse with really cheap and nasty peripherals, or drivers based on reverse-engineering and vendor hostility; but happens occasionally even on the oh-so-integrated macs. Currently, a reboot, or a hard power cut/battery removal at worst, will always flush state and sort them out; but truly nonvolatile devices will either have to be a great deal better engineered and more reliable, or include some sort of watchdog that can forcibly flush the state of a malfunctioning device...
Y'know what's worse than the size? The image it conjures up: Bees are eusocial insects, living in a colony of sterile females, presided over by a breeding queen and a few drones who are born to mate with the queen and then die.
Imagining Larry Ellison as the Queen of Oracle, breeding with a revolving door set of board members in order to give birth to every employee, enforcing his leadership by pheremonal signals, is not a recipe for sweet dreams...
Unfortunately, I can't help you there. We were rather underutilizing the sharepoint setup, as little more than a glorified shared drive, only with more annoying complexity.
That, combined with the fact that virtually all the document production of the department is lightly formatted near-plaintext technical documentation, with the occasional screenshot and hyperlink, also had a lot to do with making the pitch successful. Had we been 100% behind sharepoint at the time, it almost certainly would have failed. However, since we weren't putting too much effort into gettting the most out of any document management setup, I was able to sell the wiki(ended up being dokuwiki, I think) as a great "80/20 solution". Sharepoint would give you more features(and I freely acknowledged that); but required a greater level of work and buy-in than the department was giving it. The wiki would give us 80ish% of the benefits for 20% of the effort.
So far, that has been largely true. For a department of our size, the wiki lives on a tiny little VM, not consuming any CALs or licences or anything, gives us versioning and attribution for the mostly plaintext documentation/links/screenshots stuff, and supports links to an SMB share where we can store installers and documents that absolutely have to be in Word, and so forth.
Not quite as seamless; but it was fast, easy, and cheap. The fact that I could go from "nothing" to "full demo" in a little bit of spare time just helped drive that home.
Depending on corporate culture(and the exact policies RE: demos of the proprietary vendor) cost can actually be a huge factor; but not for the obvious "cheap=better" reason.
In some institutional cultures there is a surprising power(assuming you don't step on the wrong toes) in Just Fucking Doing It. Obviously, unless you have really impressive guts and not too much sense, this doesn't mean putting a production server on an internet facing IP and hacking the company's DNS records to point to it; but showing up with a solid, functioning demo that everyone can gather around the projector and poke around at on their laptops can really sell something.
If a proprietary product isn't either available as a free demo version, and not through some subscription program you have to sign up for, or so expensive that the company will send a guy in a nice suit to do the demo, hand out some swag, and give everyone a really nice handshake, doing that with a proprietary product is hard and/or illegal.
Doing it with a FOSS(or freeware, admittedly) product is easy. You just throw something together in a VM and show it off.
That was my experience when I was trying to convince my employer to drop sharepoint for a wiki. They weren't turned off by the cost of sharepoint; but the fact that I was able to ask my boss for some time at one of our department meetings, get behind the projector and say "Hey, I threw this demo together in a weekend and put in some example content so you can get an idea of how we would use it. Easy web interface, versioning, strong ability to create links between otherwise disparate pieces of technical knowledge, check it out at $INTERNAL_IP..." Everyone pulled out their laptops, poked around a bit, there was some discussion, and the boss green-lighted it.
Had I given a speech about how we had to, like, fight the proprietary power, man, it would have gone nowhere. However, being able to just sit down, turn on, and show off, all without any serious backing or funding(because everything was free) allowed me to go from "nothing" to "green light-full production status". "Free" never entered into it in a hard financial way. However, had it not been free, I couldn't have done what I did. Now, Anecdote doesn't equal data, much less proof; but it is something to consider.
I think that your hypothesis has merit, in the sense that Google Docs is probably a bigger longterm threat(particularly to home user sales: once a corporation buys a bunch of sharepoint licenses, I suspect MS stops worrying); but I'm not sure that releasing this video will be much of a strike against Google Docs.
Google's Docs thrust seems to be coming in two directions: one is the casual user pitch, by subtly linking it to their other offerings("view as HTML" for PDF results in a google search is now called "quick view" and, once clicked, dumps you into Google Docs, rather than the old static HTML version. Similar linkages are to be found in Gmail and so forth). I suspect that this will be fairly effective, particularly since Google Docs(while it doesn't even try to go toe-to-toe with Office's feature list, has a few absolutely killer features for casual users: Anyone who isn't a gearhead or a cube drone with a good IT team has historically been without both document versioning and an offsite backup. Docs gives you both, for free, relatively intuitively). The sort of people who are brought in by this pitch probably won't even see this MS video, or know of its existence. They might be brought into Microsoft's "Live" camp by MS doing similar linking to Hotmail; but that pretty much depends on which email service they've been using for years now. The video might have more value against Google's second pitch direction, the "$COMPANY_AND_OR_STATE_ENTITY Has Gone Google" advertisements, which are explicitly aimed at getting organizations to switch. Here again, Microsoft is probably pretty safe from Google among their giant corporate customers, since(if you buy enough add-ons, server products, and IT support) you can already get all the features of Office, plus things like versioning, backup, and availability on any computer in an enterprise; but any company/organization that was seriously using OpenOffice is much more likely to not be wedded to Microsoft to nearly that extent. They could, easily enough, say "OpenOffice is kind of a hassle; but the sticker shock on a proper Office deployment is killing me. Hey, Google has something that costs about as much, per year, as I spend at starbucks in a month, and nothing to install. Interesting..."