If we can monitor things so closely, can anyone explain to me why we can't watch iraq, or afganastan for movement by terrorists?
The higher the resolution of the data, the less frequently it can be obtained.
Images of the earth at 1-km resolution are acquired by geosynchronous satellites about every 15 minutes (e.g. GOES).
Images of the earth at 250-m resolution are acquired about once a day (e.g. MODIS)
Images of the earth at 15-m resolution are acquired as often as once every two weeks (e.g. LandSat 7
Data from the above three satellite instruments are publicly available. You could create your own database, if you had the bandwidth and storage capacity.
There are other satellite instruments that take much higher-resolution images, but these are generally "targeting" instruments - you need to give them specific locations to capture, because there isn't enough storage and bandwidth to cover the entire earth regularly at that resolution. It typically takes weeks or months (if not longer) to create a high-resolution mosaic of something like a city.
Note, though, that geosynchronous satellites are the only ones that could take continuous images of a particular location, and they're too far away to take high-resolution images. High-resolution imagers have to be taken from lower orbit, which means that the satellites are moving, and thus they can't stay focused on the same spot for very long.
Also, many high-resolution images are taken from aircraft, not satellites. This is a convenient way to get high-resolution images of major cities, but this doesn't help us with reconnaisance in Iraq or Afghanistan, for obvious reasons...
The title is misleading. I read the specs page, and it doesn't sound like it's a hard disk recorder to me. It sounds like it's a basic MIDI sequencing program, of the type that could be used to create "classic" videogame soundtracks. The "hard disk recording" option is just a protocol that allows digital transfer of the raw sequencer data, and then a client program that turns it into a clean WAV file. This means that you can get a clean, noise-free recording of your cheezy retro music sequence, that's all.
Not saying you couldn't have a lot of fun with one of those - heck, composing music is a lot more creative than playing a sidescroller, but this is NOT a tool for pro musicians to use to record jam sessions, which is what was implied.
Firefox has more or less caught up with Safari's advantages. However, in terms of speed, I would argue that while Firefox is faster at rendering the actual webpages, Safari is a more responsive Mac app - UI elements respond faster. Not nearly as bad as early versions of Mozilla, but you can still notice that it's a cross-platform app.
2 years from now, those restrictions could change to requiring a theoretical iTunes 5.0 which would theoretically require Windows XP & Longhorn and Mac OS 10.4.x & 10.5.x.
There's no reason to think that iTunes 4.2 would suddenly stop working. They locked out older versions of iTunes from the music store, because they wanted to offer newer features, but that did nothing to stop older versions of iTunes from playing music you already own.
Even if iTunes remains free, I'll eventually have to pay $199 for the next version of Windows or $129 for the next version of Mac OS X (and possibly a new Mac supportable by the OS X version) to continue to play music I purchased from the iTMS this year and can play this year.
MP3 files, however, will play on any playback app that supports them, regardless of the OS or the age of the hardware, long after my iPod dies.
Don't forget that you can always burn all of the songs you bought on the iTMS onto ordinary audio CDs, and play those CDs wherever, or even rip them back to MP3s if you so choose.
Close, but no importing.aiff and interface is pretty clunky. the app mentioned in the article looks very polished.
Ummmmm, Audacity does import aiff (and every other sound file format that libsndfile supports), and while you might have some gripes about the interface, Audacity has been stable for years now.
By the way, there's a huge problem with VST and GPL'd programs: the VST SDK has a restrictive license on it that doesn't allow you to redistribute it - you have to download it from Steinberg yourself, after agreeing to their terms. So the only way to distribute a GPL'd program that depends on the VST header files is if you add an exception clause to the GPL...but if you do that, you can't link to any other libraries without that exception clause, such as FFTW, for example. It's a big pain, and that's the reason Audacity doesn't have native VST support (though there are still ways to access VST plug-ins through plug-in bridges).
In a previous Slashdot article (a few months ago, I can't seem to find it at the moment), a Microsoftie was quoted as saying he had installed Firefox (among other browsers). Of course, we Slashdotters razzed him for it.
Today, we have someone from Microsoft who says they haven't installed Firefox. This is decried as shameful -- how dare he criticize the application if he hasn't tried it?
What I would expect is for a Microsoft employee to install competitive applications, learn to use them, but then use all Microsoft software. That way if the Microsoft software is subpar you have an incentive to improve it.
Any scientist worth anything would at least look for some evidence for or against rather than dismissing out of hand like the lot of you.
Exactly. We're being critical of the report because it recommends that the U.S. military spend millions on research on dubious ideas, with no evidence that the ideas have any merit.
I'm quite frankly tired of the hypocrisy I see on./. On the one hand you accuse the christian right of being bigoted or closed minded while in the same breath demonstrate how close minded and bigoted you are.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There's a difference between being open minded to the possibility that you might be wrong, and wasting enormous amounts of money and effort into an idea that has already been shown countless times to be worthless, when there are millions of other, very promising ideas, that should be funded.
Want to see who you are complaining about? Look in the mirror.
Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery, not a religion like some of you make it out to be.
That's exactly right...and the way the tool works, is that you discover whether something is true or not using a repeatable experiment. Since every attempt to repeatably test psychic powers and teleportation has failed, there's clearly nothing to discover. Think of it this way: if someone really could repeatedly predict the future or teleport, don't you think more people would know about it? The fact is that everyone who has claimed to have this ability has been unwilling to demonstrate it under scientifically controlled conditions.
Someday, if someone does discover psychic or telekinetic abilities and they can reproduce them under controlled conditions, scientists will be lining up to study them and try to learn more about how it works.
Is aids research a waste of money because no cure has been found yet? Are all studies that reach a dead end a waste of money or do they provide us with valuable insight?
There's a huge difference. AIDS research isn't blind - it doesn't succeed or fail completely. AIDS research is focused on understanding how HIV works, exactly how it might be destroyed or suppressed, or how its symptoms could be treated. Even the most theoretical AIDS research starts with a very specific theory about exactly how AIDS could be cured, based on observations made in other experiments.
His suggestion was for everyone to tell the exit pollsters that they voted exactly the opposite of the way they truly voted.
That's hilarious, because in such a close election, that's unlikely to change anything!
It would be much more effective to have everyone tell exit pollsters that they voted for Nader, or Badnarik, or someone else plausible but unlikely to win.
I may be misinterpreting the story, but it sounds to me like you need more than just the username: you need to actually trick the user into giving you their GMail cookie by phishing. Obviously, this is a huge security hole and Google should fix it immediately, but it's not quite the same as the Hotmail backdoor from last year, which didn't require phishing at all. As long as you don't ever click on a link that sends you to GMail from an untrusted source, you should be safe.
That hasn't been my experience. Suppose you find a wiki article claiming that Science Diet is the best nutrition for your pet. If you changed it to say "Science Diet is a scam, feed your pet X", it'd probably get changed back. On the other hand if you changed it to say something like this, I'll bet people would leave it alone, or modify it slightly while keeping your main argument in place:
Among people who are concerned with giving their pets a nutritious diet, Science Diet by Hills is a popular option. However, many nutritionists who have studied the "science" behind Science Diet have found that it is suspect, and that all of the studies that purport to prove Science Diet is superior were funded by companies with a vested interest. Instead, these nutritionists recommend following the X diet, backed up by this independent research [Y].
I have found that Wikipedia is full of articles that handle dissent in this way quite well. By the way, I would be interested if you could point me to objective research about pet nutrition - I always wondered about Science Diet but didn't know who to believe.
The gMini400 is very cool, no question. To be fair, though, the list price of the gMini400 is $399, only $100 less than the iPod (yes, you can find iPods for less than list price, too), and the iPod actually has longer battery life (15 hours compared to 10), besides having twice the disk space. The gMini400 may be right for you, but the iPod is hardly a bad deal.
"Windows XP is sluggish on my p4 3ghz machine with a gig of ram."
Perhaps you should scan for spyware. The 2.6GHz Northwoods around the office were extremely sluggish until we realized that spyware was stealing all of our memory and cracked down on software installation. Since then, everything is simply nto true.
I have noticed that even with Windows XP on brand-new hardware, running one computationally-intensive program in the background (for example, a compiler) slows down the responsiveness of the UI to the point where it is practically unusable. While with Mac OS X, even on a slow computer the multitasking is so good that responsiveness never goes down, even when lots of programs are busy. Unless you run out of RAM, of course - then any OS can get sluggish.
So for someone who does a lot of compiling, rendering, or calculating, and likes to do something else while that stuff is going on (surf the web, check email), Windows XP does feel amazingly sluggish compared to Mac OS X.
They have an 1150 (that you referenced) with a CDR/DVD combo (as you referenced) and a P4 2.8 and a 1 year warranty for $799 with free shipping.
I know you weren't trying to do a direct comparison, but the Dell you referenced is not really an equivalent machine:
$799 is only after a $150 mail-in rebate, which means you pay tax on the full $949 and your rebate check will take months to arrive.
Add $59 for the 802.11a/g wireless card to bring it into parity with the iBook - can you possibly imagine a portable computer without WiFi these days?
Add $39 for an upgrade to a normal battery - the one they bundle with the cheapo model is intentionally crippled.
And you're still stuck with integrated video, instead of what Apple gives you: ATI's Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics with 32MB of dedicated DDR memory and AGP 4X support! Not bad for a sub-$1000 laptop.
Finally, also note that Apple is selling the discontinued models for as low as $700, while supplies last.
And if you had a PhD in politics (hell, had you taken a single high school class) you would know that the President can't just magically enact whatever the hell he wants to.
Consider that all economic bills must originate in the House. Further, consider that the House is a Republican house at the moment. Thus, any bills authorizing spending would have to have strong REPUBLICAN support to pass.
The fact is that the president has enormous influence over Congress. When the president demands that Congress pass a certain bill and it doesn't pass, he can make huge headlines complaining about it, which forces congresspeople and senators to the negotiating table. As leverage, the president can use his veto power over other bills he knows Congress really wants to pass.
Mac fans try to talk about the "great" hardware you get with a Mac, however if you compare a $1,500 iMac G5 vs a $1,500 AlienWare box, there is no contest. The AlienWare box gives you far better hardware that out performs a Mac hands down.
I'll take your challenge. The $1,500 iMac comes with a very high-quality 17" LCD monitor and a DVD burner. Since AlienWare doesn't sell monitors, we need to subtract at least $400 - the price of a thin-bezel ViewSonic 17" LCD. No fair substituting a cheapo LCD instead; you want a great monitor to go with your top hardware, right?
So we're down to $1100 to spend at AlienWare...now the G5 is a 64-bit processor, so I think that their "Hyperspeed" Atlhon 64 system would be a fair comparison, right? Upgrade it to a DVD burner but leave everything else alone and the total price is $1,113.
What's the dramatic difference in hardware? Well, the AlienWare has a better video card. That's about it.
This point has been debated over and over, so I'll mention the $799 eMacs (educ discount) and $949 ibooks (also discount) and $1199 iMacs and move on.
Actually the educational price for the eMac is $749. $799 is the suggested retail price. If you buy it from most Mac catalogs you get it for $799 plus a free RAM upgrade.
4) I told my father to buy my mother a Mac. He said no because a PC was 1/6 the cost of a machine at Frys. Any $300 PC will have a better video card than the new iMac. I'm not sure you can still buy PC vidoe cards that suck as bad as what they put in the iMac (and yes apple, thats why there isn't a new iMac sitting on my desk)
OK, you don't know what you're talking about. First of all, point me to a $300 PC. Rebates don't count - they take 6 months to arrive, if they come at all, and you pay taxes on the pre-rebate amount. The cheapest eMachines box is currently $449 before rebate, and guess what? It comes with Intel integrated video (crappy 3D) that uses shared memory - which means it takes away from your system RAM. The eMac comes with an ATI Radeon 9200 and 32 MB of dedicated VRAM, the iMac comes with an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra and 64 MB of VRAM. Are these top of the line video cards? No, but they don't suck, and they're infinitely better than Intel integrated video.
The cheapest eMachines I could find that had a real video card with dedicated VRAM cost $600. The cheapest Dell with a real video card cost $950.
If you have a counterexample, fine. But post a complete spec for a machine, the total price, and a URL.
Maybe they could use the opportunity to finally kill Carbon!
A few years ago, Apple announced that they were going to eventually drop Carbon, but under pressure from a lot of long-time Mac developers, they changed their mind. Now, instead, they're slowly rewriting the cruftiest parts of Carbon so that they more closely match the ObjC implementation. There is now basically nothing that you can do in Cocoa that you can't do in Carbon. This is great for developers because Carbon, being a pure C API, is much easier to wrap to be called from other languages, than Cocoa is.
The entire GUI and all of the hundreds of libraries ("Frameworks" in Mac OS X) that Mac OS X apps depend on would need to be ported, and many of these are only designed to work on PowerPC currently.
Well, no, that's not true. The actual OS X GUI, frameworks, and libraries are largely NeXTStep, and that stuff is quite portable and even ran on x86 at some point.
The foundation is NeXTStep, but what about Quartz, Quartz Extreme, ColorSync, CoreAudio, I/O Kit, VecLib, developer tools like Shark? These were all built specifically for Mac OS X on PPC, and that's just naming a few.
Of course, OS X also has Carbon and the backwards compatibility stuff in it and that might be harder to port.
Carbon would be tricky, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as trying to port Classic.
Here are the mistaken assumptions implicit in this question:
1. Because Darwin runs on x86 (true), most of the work to port Mac OS X to x86 is already done.
False. Darwin is a very important part of Mac OS X, but in size it is only a tiny fraction of the operating system. The entire GUI and all of the hundreds of libraries ("Frameworks" in Mac OS X) that Mac OS X apps depend on would need to be ported, and many of these are only designed to work on PowerPC currently.
2. If Apple ported Mac OS X to x86, you'd be able to run it on a typical PC.
False. Not unless Apple is able to get every major PC hardware manufacturer to release Mac OS X drivers. Apple might have the drivers already for a basic low-end Dell, but what if you have a PC with a third-party sound card? Or a video card that's not a recent nVidia or Radeon? Or a brand-new DVD burner that's only supported on Windows? What if you have a laptop, and you want it to be able to sleep? All of this would require the cooperation of all of these hardware manufacturers, and it's not clear that they'd have any incentive to cooperate.
3. There would be plenty of applications to choose from.
False. Mac applications wouldn't run until they've been ported and recompiled for x86, and it's not clear what incentive Mac developers would have to spend all of that effort with no guarantee of returns. Windows apps wouldn't run just because it's on x86; the operating systems are too different (though porting WINE to Mac OS X on x86 would be slightly easier than on PPC). Linux apps would run the same as they already do - most popular Linux apps already run on Mac OS X natively anyway (see the fink project).
4. PCs are really that much cheaper than Macs anyway.
Sure, they're cheaper sometimes, but not nearly as much as most people think. Yes, you can build a PC yourself for a lot less than a Mac - if you know what you're doing. And yes, you can get a low-end PC without a monitor - while only high-end Macs come headless. But probably 90% of the world buys brand-name PCs with monitors. On the low end, a brand-name PC with a CRT monitor and DVD/CD-RW will be about $600, compared to $800 for the eMac (and the eMac will come with a better graphics card). A brand-name PC with a non-Celeron processor, a real graphics card (not integrated video), DVD/CD-RW, and a high-quality 17" LCD will cost $1200, compared to $1300 for the iMac (and the iMac is a fraction of the size and weight). It only gets better when you start looking at the high-end machines - you'll find that the Power Mac G5 is often cheaper than a dual-Xeon or dual-Opteron workstation.
To understand and protect our home planet To explore the universe, and search for life To inspire the next generation of explorers, as only NASA can.
You might think that last line is a little cheezy, but no more so than your average mission statement, I guess. Anyway, earthquake research clearly falls under the "understand and protect our home planet" part of NASA's mission. (Disclaimer: I work for JPL, on almost entirely Earth science projects.)
I also feel that Open Office should stop trying to closely emulate MS Office and try to produce something much better.
I think it's hilarious that you're applauding AMD making x86-compatible, but better, processors, and at the same time suggesting that OpenOffice.org shouldn't be emulating MS Office? I'm sorry, but OpenOffice.org is succeeding where other office apps are failing because they do the best job of opening MS Office apps and providing a workalike interface. That doesn't mean OpenOffice.org doesn't have lots of innovations over MS Office - it already does - but that first we need compatibility to get people to convert, then we can take it whole new directions.
Kind of like Mozilla/FireFox - I don't care how many whiz-bang features it has, none of that matters until it can render 99.9% of web pages perfectly, as fast as any other browser out there. Once you've got that, you can add all of the features you want.
I know at least one very sharp businessman who explained to me how he carefully made sure the proprietary code in his system would only be dynamically linked to the GPL-protected code. If he left things statically linked, he would be legally bound to release all of his code and his investors wouldn't allow that.
What do you think the real advantages are of going to places like Harvard or Yale? Sure, the quality of education is good, but more importantly, the students who go there are sons and daughters of presidents, senators and CEOs. They are all socializing with each other and building relationships that they carry with them when they are running the country in 20 years. It is nearly impossible for the average person to make similar 'connections'.
Keep in mind that you don't have to be rich to go to Harvard or Yale. While it is unfortunately still possible to get into many top schools because of your last name (e.g., Bush), for the most part acceptance is purely based on your academic ability - good grades, good test scores, good essay, and good letters of recommendation. By "good" I mean "exceptional", of course - these schools are very selective. But if you are an exceptional student, it doesn't matter how much money your parents make - your parents will be asked to pay as much as they can, and the school will provide financial aid to cover the rest, with a combination of grants and loans.
So I don't necessarily agree that private colleges are increasing the class divide. Instead, most of the best colleges and universities are helping to equalize the class divide, because they have the financial resources to fully support poor but academically gifted students.
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If we can monitor things so closely, can anyone explain to me why we can't watch iraq, or afganastan for movement by terrorists?
The higher the resolution of the data, the less frequently it can be obtained.
Images of the earth at 1-km resolution are acquired by geosynchronous satellites about every 15 minutes (e.g. GOES).
Images of the earth at 250-m resolution are acquired about once a day (e.g. MODIS)
Images of the earth at 15-m resolution are acquired as often as once every two weeks (e.g. LandSat 7
Data from the above three satellite instruments are publicly available. You could create your own database, if you had the bandwidth and storage capacity.
There are other satellite instruments that take much higher-resolution images, but these are generally "targeting" instruments - you need to give them specific locations to capture, because there isn't enough storage and bandwidth to cover the entire earth regularly at that resolution. It typically takes weeks or months (if not longer) to create a high-resolution mosaic of something like a city.
Note, though, that geosynchronous satellites are the only ones that could take continuous images of a particular location, and they're too far away to take high-resolution images. High-resolution imagers have to be taken from lower orbit, which means that the satellites are moving, and thus they can't stay focused on the same spot for very long.
Also, many high-resolution images are taken from aircraft, not satellites. This is a convenient way to get high-resolution images of major cities, but this doesn't help us with reconnaisance in Iraq or Afghanistan, for obvious reasons...
The title is misleading. I read the specs page, and it doesn't sound like it's a hard disk recorder to me. It sounds like it's a basic MIDI sequencing program, of the type that could be used to create "classic" videogame soundtracks. The "hard disk recording" option is just a protocol that allows digital transfer of the raw sequencer data, and then a client program that turns it into a clean WAV file. This means that you can get a clean, noise-free recording of your cheezy retro music sequence, that's all.
Not saying you couldn't have a lot of fun with one of those - heck, composing music is a lot more creative than playing a sidescroller, but this is NOT a tool for pro musicians to use to record jam sessions, which is what was implied.
Firefox has more or less caught up with Safari's advantages. However, in terms of speed, I would argue that while Firefox is faster at rendering the actual webpages, Safari is a more responsive Mac app - UI elements respond faster. Not nearly as bad as early versions of Mozilla, but you can still notice that it's a cross-platform app.
2 years from now, those restrictions could change to requiring a theoretical iTunes 5.0 which would theoretically require Windows XP & Longhorn and Mac OS 10.4.x & 10.5.x.
There's no reason to think that iTunes 4.2 would suddenly stop working. They locked out older versions of iTunes from the music store, because they wanted to offer newer features, but that did nothing to stop older versions of iTunes from playing music you already own.
Even if iTunes remains free, I'll eventually have to pay $199 for the next version of Windows or $129 for the next version of Mac OS X (and possibly a new Mac supportable by the OS X version) to continue to play music I purchased from the iTMS this year and can play this year.
MP3 files, however, will play on any playback app that supports them, regardless of the OS or the age of the hardware, long after my iPod dies.
Don't forget that you can always burn all of the songs you bought on the iTMS onto ordinary audio CDs, and play those CDs wherever, or even rip them back to MP3s if you so choose.
Close, but no importing .aiff and interface is pretty clunky. the app mentioned in the article looks very polished.
Ummmmm, Audacity does import aiff (and every other sound file format that libsndfile supports), and while you might have some gripes about the interface, Audacity has been stable for years now.
By the way, there's a huge problem with VST and GPL'd programs: the VST SDK has a restrictive license on it that doesn't allow you to redistribute it - you have to download it from Steinberg yourself, after agreeing to their terms. So the only way to distribute a GPL'd program that depends on the VST header files is if you add an exception clause to the GPL...but if you do that, you can't link to any other libraries without that exception clause, such as FFTW, for example. It's a big pain, and that's the reason Audacity doesn't have native VST support (though there are still ways to access VST plug-ins through plug-in bridges).
In a previous Slashdot article (a few months ago, I can't seem to find it at the moment), a Microsoftie was quoted as saying he had installed Firefox (among other browsers). Of course, we Slashdotters razzed him for it.
Today, we have someone from Microsoft who says they haven't installed Firefox. This is decried as shameful -- how dare he criticize the application if he hasn't tried it?
What I would expect is for a Microsoft employee to install competitive applications, learn to use them, but then use all Microsoft software. That way if the Microsoft software is subpar you have an incentive to improve it.
Any scientist worth anything would at least look for some evidence for or against rather than dismissing out of hand like the lot of you.
./. On the one hand you accuse the christian right of being bigoted or closed minded while in the same breath demonstrate how close minded and bigoted you are.
Exactly. We're being critical of the report because it recommends that the U.S. military spend millions on research on dubious ideas, with no evidence that the ideas have any merit.
I'm quite frankly tired of the hypocrisy I see on
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There's a difference between being open minded to the possibility that you might be wrong, and wasting enormous amounts of money and effort into an idea that has already been shown countless times to be worthless, when there are millions of other, very promising ideas, that should be funded.
Want to see who you are complaining about? Look in the mirror.
Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery, not a religion like some of you make it out to be.
That's exactly right...and the way the tool works, is that you discover whether something is true or not using a repeatable experiment. Since every attempt to repeatably test psychic powers and teleportation has failed, there's clearly nothing to discover. Think of it this way: if someone really could repeatedly predict the future or teleport, don't you think more people would know about it? The fact is that everyone who has claimed to have this ability has been unwilling to demonstrate it under scientifically controlled conditions.
Someday, if someone does discover psychic or telekinetic abilities and they can reproduce them under controlled conditions, scientists will be lining up to study them and try to learn more about how it works.
Is aids research a waste of money because no cure has been found yet? Are all studies that reach a dead end a waste of money or do they provide us with valuable insight?
There's a huge difference. AIDS research isn't blind - it doesn't succeed or fail completely. AIDS research is focused on understanding how HIV works, exactly how it might be destroyed or suppressed, or how its symptoms could be treated. Even the most theoretical AIDS research starts with a very specific theory about exactly how AIDS could be cured, based on observations made in other experiments.
His suggestion was for everyone to tell the exit pollsters that they voted exactly the opposite of the way they truly voted.
That's hilarious, because in such a close election, that's unlikely to change anything!
It would be much more effective to have everyone tell exit pollsters that they voted for Nader, or Badnarik, or someone else plausible but unlikely to win.
I may be misinterpreting the story, but it sounds to me like you need more than just the username: you need to actually trick the user into giving you their GMail cookie by phishing. Obviously, this is a huge security hole and Google should fix it immediately, but it's not quite the same as the Hotmail backdoor from last year, which didn't require phishing at all. As long as you don't ever click on a link that sends you to GMail from an untrusted source, you should be safe.
That hasn't been my experience. Suppose you find a wiki article claiming that Science Diet is the best nutrition for your pet. If you changed it to say "Science Diet is a scam, feed your pet X", it'd probably get changed back. On the other hand if you changed it to say something like this, I'll bet people would leave it alone, or modify it slightly while keeping your main argument in place:
I have found that Wikipedia is full of articles that handle dissent in this way quite well. By the way, I would be interested if you could point me to objective research about pet nutrition - I always wondered about Science Diet but didn't know who to believe.
The gMini400 is very cool, no question. To be fair, though, the list price of the gMini400 is $399, only $100 less than the iPod (yes, you can find iPods for less than list price, too), and the iPod actually has longer battery life (15 hours compared to 10), besides having twice the disk space. The gMini400 may be right for you, but the iPod is hardly a bad deal.
"Windows XP is sluggish on my p4 3ghz machine with a gig of ram."
Perhaps you should scan for spyware. The 2.6GHz Northwoods around the office were extremely sluggish until we realized that spyware was stealing all of our memory and cracked down on software installation. Since then, everything is simply nto true.
I have noticed that even with Windows XP on brand-new hardware, running one computationally-intensive program in the background (for example, a compiler) slows down the responsiveness of the UI to the point where it is practically unusable. While with Mac OS X, even on a slow computer the multitasking is so good that responsiveness never goes down, even when lots of programs are busy. Unless you run out of RAM, of course - then any OS can get sluggish.
So for someone who does a lot of compiling, rendering, or calculating, and likes to do something else while that stuff is going on (surf the web, check email), Windows XP does feel amazingly sluggish compared to Mac OS X.
They have an 1150 (that you referenced) with a CDR/DVD combo (as you referenced) and a P4 2.8 and a 1 year warranty for $799 with free shipping.
I know you weren't trying to do a direct comparison, but the Dell you referenced is not really an equivalent machine:
$799 is only after a $150 mail-in rebate, which means you pay tax on the full $949 and your rebate check will take months to arrive.
Add $59 for the 802.11a/g wireless card to bring it into parity with the iBook - can you possibly imagine a portable computer without WiFi these days?
Add $39 for an upgrade to a normal battery - the one they bundle with the cheapo model is intentionally crippled.
And you're still stuck with integrated video, instead of what Apple gives you: ATI's Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics with 32MB of dedicated DDR memory and AGP 4X support! Not bad for a sub-$1000 laptop.
Finally, also note that Apple is selling the discontinued models for as low as $700, while supplies last.
And if you had a PhD in politics (hell, had you taken a single high school class) you would know that the President can't just magically enact whatever the hell he wants to.
Consider that all economic bills must originate in the House. Further, consider that the House is a Republican house at the moment. Thus, any bills authorizing spending would have to have strong REPUBLICAN support to pass.
The fact is that the president has enormous influence over Congress. When the president demands that Congress pass a certain bill and it doesn't pass, he can make huge headlines complaining about it, which forces congresspeople and senators to the negotiating table. As leverage, the president can use his veto power over other bills he knows Congress really wants to pass.
Mac fans try to talk about the "great" hardware you get with a Mac, however if you compare a $1,500 iMac G5 vs a $1,500 AlienWare box, there is no contest. The AlienWare box gives you far better hardware that out performs a Mac hands down.
I'll take your challenge. The $1,500 iMac comes with a very high-quality 17" LCD monitor and a DVD burner. Since AlienWare doesn't sell monitors, we need to subtract at least $400 - the price of a thin-bezel ViewSonic 17" LCD. No fair substituting a cheapo LCD instead; you want a great monitor to go with your top hardware, right?
So we're down to $1100 to spend at AlienWare...now the G5 is a 64-bit processor, so I think that their "Hyperspeed" Atlhon 64 system would be a fair comparison, right? Upgrade it to a DVD burner but leave everything else alone and the total price is $1,113.
What's the dramatic difference in hardware? Well, the AlienWare has a better video card. That's about it.
This point has been debated over and over, so I'll mention the $799 eMacs (educ discount) and $949 ibooks (also discount) and $1199 iMacs and move on.
Actually the educational price for the eMac is $749. $799 is the suggested retail price. If you buy it from most Mac catalogs you get it for $799 plus a free RAM upgrade.
4) I told my father to buy my mother a Mac. He said no because a PC was 1/6 the cost of a machine at Frys. Any $300 PC will have a better video card than the new iMac. I'm not sure you can still buy PC vidoe cards that suck as bad as what they put in the iMac (and yes apple, thats why there isn't a new iMac sitting on my desk)
OK, you don't know what you're talking about. First of all, point me to a $300 PC. Rebates don't count - they take 6 months to arrive, if they come at all, and you pay taxes on the pre-rebate amount. The cheapest eMachines box is currently $449 before rebate, and guess what? It comes with Intel integrated video (crappy 3D) that uses shared memory - which means it takes away from your system RAM. The eMac comes with an ATI Radeon 9200 and 32 MB of dedicated VRAM, the iMac comes with an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra and 64 MB of VRAM. Are these top of the line video cards? No, but they don't suck, and they're infinitely better than Intel integrated video.
The cheapest eMachines I could find that had a real video card with dedicated VRAM cost $600. The cheapest Dell with a real video card cost $950.
If you have a counterexample, fine. But post a complete spec for a machine, the total price, and a URL.
Maybe they could use the opportunity to finally kill Carbon!
A few years ago, Apple announced that they were going to eventually drop Carbon, but under pressure from a lot of long-time Mac developers, they changed their mind. Now, instead, they're slowly rewriting the cruftiest parts of Carbon so that they more closely match the ObjC implementation. There is now basically nothing that you can do in Cocoa that you can't do in Carbon. This is great for developers because Carbon, being a pure C API, is much easier to wrap to be called from other languages, than Cocoa is.
Carbon's not going anywhere.
Well, no, that's not true. The actual OS X GUI, frameworks, and libraries are largely NeXTStep, and that stuff is quite portable and even ran on x86 at some point.
The foundation is NeXTStep, but what about Quartz, Quartz Extreme, ColorSync, CoreAudio, I/O Kit, VecLib, developer tools like Shark? These were all built specifically for Mac OS X on PPC, and that's just naming a few.
Of course, OS X also has Carbon and the backwards compatibility stuff in it and that might be harder to port.
Carbon would be tricky, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as trying to port Classic.
Here are the mistaken assumptions implicit in this question:
1. Because Darwin runs on x86 (true), most of the work to port Mac OS X to x86 is already done.
False. Darwin is a very important part of Mac OS X, but in size it is only a tiny fraction of the operating system. The entire GUI and all of the hundreds of libraries ("Frameworks" in Mac OS X) that Mac OS X apps depend on would need to be ported, and many of these are only designed to work on PowerPC currently.
2. If Apple ported Mac OS X to x86, you'd be able to run it on a typical PC.
False. Not unless Apple is able to get every major PC hardware manufacturer to release Mac OS X drivers. Apple might have the drivers already for a basic low-end Dell, but what if you have a PC with a third-party sound card? Or a video card that's not a recent nVidia or Radeon? Or a brand-new DVD burner that's only supported on Windows? What if you have a laptop, and you want it to be able to sleep? All of this would require the cooperation of all of these hardware manufacturers, and it's not clear that they'd have any incentive to cooperate.
3. There would be plenty of applications to choose from.
False. Mac applications wouldn't run until they've been ported and recompiled for x86, and it's not clear what incentive Mac developers would have to spend all of that effort with no guarantee of returns. Windows apps wouldn't run just because it's on x86; the operating systems are too different (though porting WINE to Mac OS X on x86 would be slightly easier than on PPC). Linux apps would run the same as they already do - most popular Linux apps already run on Mac OS X natively anyway (see the fink project).
4. PCs are really that much cheaper than Macs anyway.
Sure, they're cheaper sometimes, but not nearly as much as most people think. Yes, you can build a PC yourself for a lot less than a Mac - if you know what you're doing. And yes, you can get a low-end PC without a monitor - while only high-end Macs come headless. But probably 90% of the world buys brand-name PCs with monitors. On the low end, a brand-name PC with a CRT monitor and DVD/CD-RW will be about $600, compared to $800 for the eMac (and the eMac will come with a better graphics card). A brand-name PC with a non-Celeron processor, a real graphics card (not integrated video), DVD/CD-RW, and a high-quality 17" LCD will cost $1200, compared to $1300 for the iMac (and the iMac is a fraction of the size and weight). It only gets better when you start looking at the high-end machines - you'll find that the Power Mac G5 is often cheaper than a dual-Xeon or dual-Opteron workstation.
Why is this funded by NASA?
NASA's mission statement reads:
To understand and protect our home planet
To explore the universe, and search for life
To inspire the next generation of explorers, as only NASA can.
You might think that last line is a little cheezy, but no more so than your average mission statement, I guess. Anyway, earthquake research clearly falls under the "understand and protect our home planet" part of NASA's mission. (Disclaimer: I work for JPL, on almost entirely Earth science projects.)
Exactly.
I also feel that Open Office should stop trying to closely emulate MS Office and try to produce something much better.
I think it's hilarious that you're applauding AMD making x86-compatible, but better, processors, and at the same time suggesting that OpenOffice.org shouldn't be emulating MS Office? I'm sorry, but OpenOffice.org is succeeding where other office apps are failing because they do the best job of opening MS Office apps and providing a workalike interface. That doesn't mean OpenOffice.org doesn't have lots of innovations over MS Office - it already does - but that first we need compatibility to get people to convert, then we can take it whole new directions.
Kind of like Mozilla/FireFox - I don't care how many whiz-bang features it has, none of that matters until it can render 99.9% of web pages perfectly, as fast as any other browser out there. Once you've got that, you can add all of the features you want.
I know at least one very sharp businessman who explained to me how he carefully made sure the proprietary code in his system would only be dynamically linked to the GPL-protected code. If he left things statically linked, he would be legally bound to release all of his code and his investors wouldn't allow that.
Hmmm, according to my reading of the GPL FAQ, even dynamically linking creates a derivative work, and thus all of the code would need to be under the GPL. No?
What do you think the real advantages are of going to places like Harvard or Yale? Sure, the quality of education is good, but more importantly, the students who go there are sons and daughters of presidents, senators and CEOs. They are all socializing with each other and building relationships that they carry with them when they are running the country in 20 years. It is nearly impossible for the average person to make similar 'connections'.
Keep in mind that you don't have to be rich to go to Harvard or Yale. While it is unfortunately still possible to get into many top schools because of your last name (e.g., Bush), for the most part acceptance is purely based on your academic ability - good grades, good test scores, good essay, and good letters of recommendation. By "good" I mean "exceptional", of course - these schools are very selective. But if you are an exceptional student, it doesn't matter how much money your parents make - your parents will be asked to pay as much as they can, and the school will provide financial aid to cover the rest, with a combination of grants and loans.
So I don't necessarily agree that private colleges are increasing the class divide. Instead, most of the best colleges and universities are helping to equalize the class divide, because they have the financial resources to fully support poor but academically gifted students.