i would've thought that more important than explaining bombardier beetles' butts would be its relevance to the theories of stephen jay gould and richard c lewontin. sadly, mr gould is no longer among us.
if you want to read more about their theories start here.
for starters your code snippet assigns the value of nvidia to card_manufacturer, so if it was coded like that, ALL cards would be considered nVidia.
while i agree with your basic point about competition, you seem to be overlooking some facts. you're praising ATI for DirectX 9 support? why? talk about trying to get a monopoly on a market. as far as the radeon being a superior card, that it may be, in a laboratory. but when you put the card in a number of different machines running a number of different OS, its the interface to that hardware that really matters. and there's no doubt that nVidia make the best drivers. i could include a veritable litany of praise for their drivers, both from engineers who write drivers for OS, as well as game developers (including the famous mr carmack).
don't you think that as soon as radeon can they'll find some game company to produce a game that exploits the features in their chipset?
its a tit-for-tat game, but graphics hardware is not an easy way to make a living.
It doesn't. BeOS does (or rather did). 6 years ago Apple offered to buy Be for US$125 million. In the end they made the exact same decision Be made; Unix. I still have the Taligent Guide to Object Oriented Programming. I probably should have sold it to a used book shop, although I doubt I would have got that much for it...
So why Be, because it was already largely Posix compliant, and yes, it ran on both PPC and x86. Jobs, when referring to that famous windowing OS demo at Xerox PARC back in 1970, said that it was obvious that this was the future, it was only a question of who would win.
That said, Apple is a hardware company, first and foremost, and in order to show profit has to sell hardware. M$ is an OS company.
The real question is why isn't there a M$ port to PPC, the answer is plain; the hardware isn't priced for the market. Even with all that Apple has done to make the cost comptetive. OK, for an iMac, they might get sales based on design, but in 6 months every small manufacturer in Singapore and Malaysia will copy whatever they put out. So whats left? The brand. And the brand is Apple's first and foremost concern. Thats why Mac OS for x86 means nothing, until they also brand x86 platform hardware.
the poster got this part wrong. it is an unusually uniform cluster. from the article :
"Chimps show more genetic variation than humans in all areas - with this one exception, which is seriously condensed," said Dr. Ronald Bontrop, who led a Dutch team that worked with statisticians from the University of California.
...but until they taste them both, they don't know.
the strange truth of the matter is that quite often even then they are incapable of knowing. it could be a bottle of wine, or a watch, or any one of a number of consumer goods. in fact, expectation of quality, as so many other posters have noted, usually plays as much of a role in its appraisal as inherent quality.
the java applet is very interesting. i especially like the fast forward/reverse. however one of the things it seems to show is that the asteroid will pass very close to venus, with no seeming gravitational effect on the asteroid. a random guess at the distance would put it around 0.05AU ~7.5M kM.
The end result of this, then, is that ordinary computer users will be forced to subsidize (through the use of CPU cycles, electricity, wear and tear on hardware, and memory use) the efforts of large companies and governments who are working against their best interests. So, tell me again... what would we gain from this?
who said anything about forced? don't get your panties all in a bunch. and besides, who said anything about govenment? what about any crime syndicate, who incidentally probably have more cash on hand than many small nations?
and in case you think i'm totally of my rocker, what about p2p-blacknet, or better yet, black market data clusters? who else do i turn to when i need to design drugs and carry out bioinformatics experiments that aren't quite legal?
________________________________________________ __ __
here is an excerpt an a question-answer session with bill joy that all this talk about 10G made me think about.
What about bandwidth?
It's coming. In Aspen, where I live, we have a spread-spectrum 1-megabit T1 wireless network which we put in ourselves. This network covers the whole town. It operates as our LAN, except we put antennas up on the mountains so we, and others, can go anywhere in town and be on it. It was just an experiment. There is a cab driver in town who has a wireless T1 in his taxi and a laser light show and all this gear and MIDI on board. He is truly wireless. But by doing this time warp, we discovered a discontinuity. There is a break point in bandwidth around a million bits, or a megabit, per second. If you get below a million bits you notice the lack of speed. But with anything above 1.5 million bits you hardly notice the increase; the difference between 2 megabits and 10 megabits is negligible. It is really surprising.
i have a netgear 114FR (france). i read through the manual first, and made note of the section where they describe how to have the router impersonate a MAC. i disconnected the cable modem, installed the router and configured it to use my primary machine's MAC. then i restarted the cable. how would they know, merely from the MAC, that i had done anything other than turn a machine off and on?
in paris i pay ~60US$ for cable; its expensive. unlimited dl, ul/128k now free up to 500M (250M until 2 months ago). initially their DNS servers would have problems, but they fixed that.
then again there is only one provider, and if you're not connected you have to take DSL from France Telecom, if its available where you live.
the interesting thing is that the provider is owned by Vivendi, but any type of restricting or otherwise impeding access to content doesn't seem to have happened, and if it did would probably be investigated by the gov't. maybe the US needs more oversight on these matters?
then again, in greece they keep advertising ISDN as the latest thing; been there, done that, been there don't want to go back...
one of the best on the subject, apparently in the minds of others as well, is Andre LaMothe's The Black Art of 3D Game Programming. It covers vector mathematics and matrix multiplication in a fairly accessible way, and more importantly goes through the optimization necessary to turn conceptually correct algorithms into something that will churn out FPS.
if you've followed what has happened here and are familiar with the terms of the sale you would know that the right to take future action via the legal system, ie. address of wrongs, etc. remains entirely the property of Be, Inc.
* 2001-08-28 09:59:55 Palm hires ATT exec to run its software unit (articles,be) (rejected)
this news followed the aquisition of Be's IP by about 2 weeks IIRC. at the time i speculated about about what Palm's intention was in buying BE, and then hiring an executive from ATT to run the software division that they were about to spin off. but i guess its only news now.
see this article [wired.com] for a more complete info on Palm's strategic maneuvers and speculation as to their intent.
can you say tank busting weapon? remember this is a projectile we're talking about, one thats only 4" in diameter. however the 130' cannon might be a liability on the battlefield.
<ramble>
on the aviation side, there have been rumors of hypersonic vehicles being tested at Area 51 for ten years now. as far as flying in one, i don't think acceleration to mach9 in less than a few mintues would be enjoyable to your average business passeneger.
</ramble>
this article at NASA gives a better explanation and has some QuickTime movies of the X43A.
i think that anyone that's willing to comment on this subject should have a good idea of the progress made in java as a language, as well as some of the pitfalls (security, etc.) that have arisen. for a good reference point read
A Quick Critique of Java, that is as long as reality.sgi.com is around.
FWW when this article came out we made a demo of our financial planning app in java. at the time we were able to achieve sufficient animation, think active graphs, by sacrificing stability (yes, stability).
lastly, one thing to keep in mind is that Java is very important in the financial world, where being able to get an app (or applet, whatever) that uses new mathematical models onto the traders' desks as quickly as possible is a competitive advantage. in that environment java is superior to VB/VC/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
the base price is US$47,771.
the SMG (sequential manual gearbox) option costs US$ 2,472
in car and driver's tests expert drivers outperformed the use of SGM autolaunch by 0.3 seconds to 60Mph.
finally, the greabox itself is a getrag type-D 6-speed.
i would've thought that more important than explaining bombardier beetles' butts would be its relevance to the theories of stephen jay gould and richard c lewontin. sadly, mr gould is no longer among us.
if you want to read more about their theories start here.
for starters your code snippet assigns the value of nvidia to card_manufacturer, so if it was coded like that, ALL cards would be considered nVidia.
while i agree with your basic point about competition, you seem to be overlooking some facts. you're praising ATI for DirectX 9 support? why? talk about trying to get a monopoly on a market. as far as the radeon being a superior card, that it may be, in a laboratory. but when you put the card in a number of different machines running a number of different OS, its the interface to that hardware that really matters. and there's no doubt that nVidia make the best drivers. i could include a veritable litany of praise for their drivers, both from engineers who write drivers for OS, as well as game developers (including the famous mr carmack).
don't you think that as soon as radeon can they'll find some game company to produce a game that exploits the features in their chipset?
its a tit-for-tat game, but graphics hardware is not an easy way to make a living.
This book was reviewed here.
*
It doesn't. BeOS does (or rather did). 6 years ago Apple offered to buy Be for US$125 million. In the end they made the exact same decision Be made; Unix. I still have the Taligent Guide to Object Oriented Programming. I probably should have sold it to a used book shop, although I doubt I would have got that much for it...
So why Be, because it was already largely Posix compliant, and yes, it ran on both PPC and x86. Jobs, when referring to that famous windowing OS demo at Xerox PARC back in 1970, said that it was obvious that this was the future, it was only a question of who would win.
That said, Apple is a hardware company, first and foremost, and in order to show profit has to sell hardware. M$ is an OS company.
The real question is why isn't there a M$ port to PPC, the answer is plain; the hardware isn't priced for the market. Even with all that Apple has done to make the cost comptetive. OK, for an iMac, they might get sales based on design, but in 6 months every small manufacturer in Singapore and Malaysia will copy whatever they put out. So whats left? The brand. And the brand is Apple's first and foremost concern. Thats why Mac OS for x86 means nothing, until they also brand x86 platform hardware.
the poster got this part wrong. it is an unusually uniform cluster. from the article : "Chimps show more genetic variation than humans in all areas - with this one exception, which is seriously condensed," said Dr. Ronald Bontrop, who led a Dutch team that worked with statisticians from the University of California.
...but until they taste them both, they don't know.
the strange truth of the matter is that quite often even then they are incapable of knowing. it could be a bottle of wine, or a watch, or any one of a number of consumer goods. in fact, expectation of quality, as so many other posters have noted, usually plays as much of a role in its appraisal as inherent quality.
What do you mean I have to pay $14.90 for a stupid daisy?
how much do you want to bet that microsoft has already offered said MIT student a job?
There must be some way to rework that acronym so that its GRANOLA ;)
the java applet is very interesting. i especially like the fast forward/reverse. however one of the things it seems to show is that the asteroid will pass very close to venus, with no seeming gravitational effect on the asteroid. a random guess at the distance would put it around 0.05AU ~7.5M kM.
are they sure that the orbit won't be perturbed?
___
so, you want to get into space, huh? well, you're gonna have to talk to vito, cuz nobody gets no rockets til vito and his boys are in on the action.
_ __ __
_______________________________________________
who said anything about forced? don't get your panties all in a bunch. and besides, who said anything about govenment? what about any crime syndicate, who incidentally probably have more cash on hand than many small nations?
and in case you think i'm totally of my rocker, what about p2p-blacknet, or better yet, black market data clusters? who else do i turn to when i need to design drugs and carry out bioinformatics experiments that aren't quite legal?
_______________________________________________
at least this way those packets won't make it to redmond ;)
_ __
_______________________________________________
how much is enough?
_ __ __
here is an excerpt an a question-answer session with bill joy that all this talk about 10G made me think about.
What about bandwidth?
It's coming. In Aspen, where I live, we have a spread-spectrum 1-megabit T1 wireless network which we put in ourselves. This network covers the whole town. It operates as our LAN, except we put antennas up on the mountains so we, and others, can go anywhere in town and be on it. It was just an experiment. There is a cab driver in town who has a wireless T1 in his taxi and a laser light show and all this gear and MIDI on board. He is truly wireless. But by doing this time warp, we discovered a discontinuity. There is a break point in bandwidth around a million bits, or a megabit, per second. If you get below a million bits you notice the lack of speed. But with anything above 1.5 million bits you hardly notice the increase; the difference between 2 megabits and 10 megabits is negligible. It is really surprising.
the rest is here.
and yeah, i'd rather have decent, ubiquitous, wireless too.
_______________________________________________
i have a netgear 114FR (france). i read through the manual first, and made note of the section where they describe how to have the router impersonate a MAC. i disconnected the cable modem, installed the router and configured it to use my primary machine's MAC. then i restarted the cable. how would they know, merely from the MAC, that i had done anything other than turn a machine off and on?
_
_______________________________________________
then again there is only one provider, and if you're not connected you have to take DSL from France Telecom, if its available where you live.
the interesting thing is that the provider is owned by Vivendi, but any type of restricting or otherwise impeding access to content doesn't seem to have happened, and if it did would probably be investigated by the gov't. maybe the US needs more oversight on these matters?
then again, in greece they keep advertising ISDN as the latest thing; been there, done that, been there don't want to go back...
_______________________________________________
i don't think you lose all your functional sperm; anyone that i know that works around this kind of equipment that has children has a daughter :)
one of the best on the subject, apparently in the minds of others as well, is Andre LaMothe's The Black Art of 3D Game Programming. It covers vector mathematics and matrix multiplication in a fairly accessible way, and more importantly goes through the optimization necessary to turn conceptually correct algorithms into something that will churn out FPS.
_______________________________________________
if you've followed what has happened here and are familiar with the terms of the sale you would know that the right to take future action via the legal system, ie. address of wrongs, etc. remains entirely the property of Be, Inc.
why do you think the price was only @US$12M?
this news followed the aquisition of Be's IP by about 2 weeks IIRC. at the time i speculated about about what Palm's intention was in buying BE, and then hiring an executive from ATT to run the software division that they were about to spin off. but i guess its only news now.
see this article [wired.com] for a more complete info on Palm's strategic maneuvers and speculation as to their intent.
____________________________________
can you say tank busting weapon? remember this is a projectile we're talking about, one thats only 4" in diameter. however the 130' cannon might be a liability on the battlefield.
<ramble>
on the aviation side, there have been rumors of hypersonic vehicles being tested at Area 51 for ten years now. as far as flying in one, i don't think acceleration to mach9 in less than a few mintues would be enjoyable to your average business passeneger.
</ramble>
this article at NASA gives a better explanation and has some QuickTime movies of the X43A.
FWW when this article came out we made a demo of our financial planning app in java. at the time we were able to achieve sufficient animation, think active graphs, by sacrificing stability (yes, stability).
lastly, one thing to keep in mind is that Java is very important in the financial world, where being able to get an app (or applet, whatever) that uses new mathematical models onto the traders' desks as quickly as possible is a competitive advantage. in that environment java is superior to VB/VC/etc.
________________________________________________