Hey, I used an Apple Newton (remember those? Heck, ever even seen one?) to take notes in high school. I bought it used for $50. A friend of mine got a keyboard for his Newton to use when taking notes, and then also got an eMate - you could probably buy a half dozen of those for $100 these days. I believe somebody wrote a web browser for them a few years ago (believe it or not, development continues on an OS that has been dead 10 years - see also Amiga, C64, etc...). At the time, I used it for notes, calendars, games, and E-mail.
If you were dedicated, you could take notes on a cell phone - hopefully one with at least a half-decent keyboard. But yeah, you'd give up a lot of usability for the price. Of course, you will give up a lot of usability for a $100 laptop, too. In any case, I doubt most students would buy a $100 laptop. Sure, us students are cheap, but are we really THAT cheap? A $100 laptop is better for a developing country, where the alternative is nothing - and even then, it's still too expensive, as food is probably more important, and wages are far lower.
Or, you could buy a cell phone. Those can be had for ~$100+ in forms that do about as much as a $100 laptop would. Plus they call people.
In any case, it's no surprise - this has been possible for a long time. The question is whether the result is marketable. Will people want a 7-inch screen? Can they live with only 1 GB of storage? Each year, the specs of what you can buy with $100 get better - at this point, they're high enough that several companies think the product has become marketable.
Unfortunately, more cache is becoming a necessity. Throughput (of the CPU and memory) increases much faster than latency decreases. These days, it's not uncommon to have a latency of a thousand clock cycles if the CPU has to go all the way to memory to fetch something. Back then, the latency might've been tens of clock cycles. So yeah, it's way more than we used to have, but without it, your computer would feel like molasses.
My dad also continued working after "retirement," three days a week. It's something he enjoys, and keeps him busy. My grandma worked until the day she died at 82 years old - she taught people with dyslexia, and also taught teachers how to teach students who have dyslexia. She never did it for the money, she didn't ask for nearly as much payment as she could have if that were the case. She did it because she loved what she was doing, and because she was making a difference for people.
What a stupid summary: don't take a statistic and claim that the reason for its change is "quite evident." (Never mind that the article states that the *average* age is staying the same.) People work longer for many reasons, not just the financial aspects.
I too was there (like 2.5 years ago) and did not go on the rides. Partly due to the price, and partly because those I was with didn't want to go (because of the price, and since they weren't into Star Trek). The cost might've been less back then, but I'm not sure about that. It was fun to visit the gift shop and the bathrooms, at least.
On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that this move surprised many people. At least when I was there, it was absolutely dead. I had heard even back then that it was in danger of being closed. Still sad, though.
I'd bet that there are both leaded and lead-free versions of the part. That's not an uncommon option to have from a manufacturer. Where I used to work, many chips were going lead-free only, which caused troubles for our leaded designs (we were in communications, which had an exemption).
I used to work for an Apple Authorized Service Provider, and we probably marked up prices at least as much as Apple did - every part we bought from Apple got marked up a fair amount, and that's on top of the $60/hour, 1-hour minimum labor charge. Never mind that, at the peak, I was only getting $11/hour. On the other hand, Apple also has (had?) a flat-rate repair service. For roughly $350, they'd replace anything and everything on a laptop, excluding accidental damage/abuse (which could drive the price up to around $1100, if the screen was involved, or much less for less expensive parts). So that actually acted like a cap on the price of repairs - if we could repair it cheaper ourselves for the individual parts and labor (despite our markups), we would; else we'd send it in to Apple.
The prices certainly weren't reasonable for RAM, hard drives, and the like - but we sold third party upgrades instead of the "official" Apple service parts when the computer was past the warranty and needed repair. But for the parts prices from Apple, a lot of repairs weren't too unreasonable (though yes, some were horrendous).
I think where they are able to come ahead is by charging prices roughly equivalent to replacement costs, but then they get the old parts back, which they may be able to fix and reuse.
Unless you own an iMac, mine is in the shop (AGAIN!) for yet another circuit board and possibly new video card.
So that was the best $169 I ever spent.
I've got news for you - they wouldn't sell them if they were unprofitable. On a large scale, it's always a better deal for them than it is for you. But, for the individual, paying a couple hundred dollars might be better than the uncertainty.
But that doesn't stop me from pretty much always buying AppleCare. Though my Macs are also on the high end, and therefore more expensive to repair or replace. I'm not sure that would be true if I bought cheap Macs.
I'd rather have somebody who knows attack vectors try to build up defenses than somebody who has only been taught how to defend. It's the difference between giving a man a fish, and teaching him how to fish. The guy who knows how to build an attack will be able to think of new ways to attack - and new ways to defend. The one who has only been taught "don't let a buffer overflow happen, or somebody might somehow be able to attack your program" probably isn't going to fare very well when he's faced with a new type of attack.
One of my college courses included hacking into a Linux machine. The assignment included lots of handholding - enough to keep us pointed in the right direction, but leaving us to discover the details on our own. It included using a buffer overflow on an HTTP server to gain remote access, then a format string attack to get root, then writing a program to break out of the chroot jail. Now, the programs we were attacking were either explicitly written to be vulnerable, or perhaps modified or outdated versions of programs. The specific attacks we were using wouldn't be useful on a well-secured system, and that's the difference between my class and this one. But a malicious student could certainly take what he learned and act maliciously on his own in either case.
They mention that the computer lab is not externally networked - so those bulletin board attacks and password logging and such are obviously not real attacks, but well-contained. I think the real news here is that there's a journalist sensationalizing the details to make his article interesting. Oh, wait, that's not news. My mistake.
You can't just land and push because it would be very difficult to push it in the right direction. You'd have to push through the center of gravity to get it to move in a straight line (rather than just making it spin). Plus, the asteroid almost certainly is already spinning, so there's not a constant location one can put a thruster and have it be pushing in the right direction. Plus, according to an article linked to from TFA, the asteroid might be little more than a pile of rubble, meaning that attaching to it (and pushing it as a whole) would be difficult.
What I'd be interested to know is how this plan avoids negative effects from the gravity tractor: for example, to hold it a constant distance from the asteroid, the satellite would have to be using propellant. The propellant would have to be sent - you guessed it - in the direction of the asteroid. Then, the propellant hits the asteroid, and pushes it in the direction we DON'T want it to go. The net effect would probably not completely cancel out the satellite's effect, as some of the propellant would spread out and miss the asteroid, and some would change its spin - but when you're talking 0.22 microns per second, you probably want to get as much of that as possible... One could avoid this by spraying propellant out in a cone (with a large dead spot in the middle), but then you're using a lot more propellant.
As long as it's working fine at the moment, there's not much you can do. If it fails repeatedly while under warranty (especially with the same problem), you're likely to be able to talk your way into a replacement computer.
Apple does have a decent history of creating repair extension programs when there's a known and particularly nasty design defect, especially when another company owns up to it being their fault. I imagine especially in those cases, they get the third party to pay for some or all of the repair costs. However, if you're really worried about it, you might consider getting AppleCare just to give yourself the three years of warranty. Of course, AppleCare, like any extended warranty, is a large profit center - but many people (myself included) decide it's better to pay a few hundred dollars upfront than to risk an expensive repair (or an even more expensive replacement) later. On the other hand, the flat-rate repair service (which I assume they still offer) isn't that much more expensive than AppleCare, so as long as you don't need more than one repair in the 2nd or 3rd year, you might be better off just risking it.
But just to be clear - I'd personally expect that many of the computers might get covered by a repair extension, which often last to 3 years beyond the date of purchase. But that doesn't help at all if your computer exhibits a symptom other than what is expected for the particular failure covered; if your CPU fails, for example, you'd be on your own without the warranty.
Go one step further - sell your car. Get a decent bike, a rear rack, and some panniers. Maybe a sizable shoulder bag, too. I'll bike to the grocery store, buy a week's worth of groceries, and take them home. When I get there, I carry the bike and groceries up the stairs - luckily I only live one flight up, but I used to live 3 flights up. Plan some fun biking trips - find a campground 30 miles away, bike there on a Saturday, and back on Sunday. Be sure to have friends bike with you. When biking isn't feasible, use public transportation, or even rent a car for those rare occasions where it's necessary. And maybe you can't get away with selling your car - but if you at least minimize how much you use it, it'll help.
Also, find something fun to do outside. I like canoeing, especially somewhere absolutely isolated (though I bring a few close friends). Ultimate frisbee is also popular with the geeks. Find a recreational league, sign up for something fun (softball, soccer, volleyball). Or just take a walk around your neighborhood - walk down the roads you've never been on before.
I agree that exercising in a gym is unappealing. So camouflage your exercise as something else - a mode of transportation, playing a game, or a leisure activity. Especially if you do it with other people, so you don't feel like you're being watched.
I believe you meant to say *simultaneous* multithreading. You probably confused the name with *symmetric* multiprocessing (SMP, the fancy name for multiple identical CPUs). And it's still generically called SMT, Hyperthreading is just Intel's brand for it. I have no specific knowledge to back this up, but I'd bet that they're doing something similar to the Sun Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1). The cores in the Niagara are single-issue in-order. However, the hardware supports multiple threads, so it can pick any of them to issue an instruction on any particular cycle - if there's a data dependency or cache miss, it can fill what would otherwise be a pipeline bubble with an instruction from a different thread. Basically, the Atom can use hyperthreading to keep the pipeline full instead of out-of-order execution. Out-of-order execution, simultaneous multithreading, and superscalar design are all independent design features.
Thank you for making it very clear that you are a Windows or Linux admin tasked with keeping the Macs running. I don't pretend to be an expert at Windows - I suggest you do the same around Macs, or learn more about them (having to use one helps, even though it's painful to get out of your comfortable habits).
That said, I doubt that there are many OS X Servers providing DNS services, but I am surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. Somebody needs to speed up that test and release cycle a bit...
One of the issues was the "Internet Sharing" buzz phrase. If you google that now, you'll find lots of warnings that if you enable this in OSX, it silently starts up a DHCP server.
...and Windows has a similar feature. I first encountered it (as a victim, not an admin) in about 2001. It can be a pain to figure out exactly which machine is doing it, but you ought to be able to tell pretty quickly that it's happening. When you don't have network access, you check the network settings - you find that there's a DHCP-assigned IP address that's not in the correct range. You should quickly figure that either your DHCP server is hosed, or there's a second one on your network.
The conventional answer you get from the OSX folks is to run the HFS+ file system, which supports case.
OK, you're getting your filesystems confused here. The default is HFS+ (aka Mac OS Extended), which is case-preserving and case-insensitive. That means that a file's upper and lower-case letters are always displayed as such, but you can't create a second file with the same name and different capitalization. There is a case-sensitive HFS+ (sometimes called HFSX), which is presumably what you switched to. It's not the default, so no surprise that the reformatted drive was case-insensitive. The ubiquitous recommendation is to always use the default HFS+ (Journaled) for the startup disk, and not the case-sensitive file systems (either case-sensitive HFS+ or UFS). Unless you really need it, use the default.
HFS is something else entirely, as others have noted.
So unless you know that you'll never want to copy directories full of files from a non-OSX machine, I'd advise against using OSX as a serious server.
Most people I know wouldn't run into an issue with case-insensitivity. It makes much more sense to differentiate your files by the name than by case. But the difference can be painful if you do.
(And you'll just get insults if you mention it here on/.;-).
Hopefully I'm not interpreted as being insulting - I just hate it when someone is wrong on the internet. But do yourself and those you support a favor - if you support Macs, learn how to do it correctly. I'm sure you're a much better Windows/Linux/whatever admin than I would be, because that's what you know the best. You can get that good on a Mac too, but only if you're willing to invest the time.
(And I have occasionally wished that I could use '/' and NUL in file names. I wonder if there's a system that allows all 256 8-bit bytes in a file name...;-)
HFS+ can do that. According to Wikipedia, allowed chars are "Unicode, any character, including NUL. OS APIs may limit some characters for legacy reasons." More specifically, : and / tend to be limited; in the OS 9 (and earlier) or OS X Finder, you can't use a colon, since that was used as the path delimiter. (In HFS, colon was prohibited, as it was reserved for that.) However, OS X goes through a few layers of translation - some layers use / as the delimiter instead. So if you name a file with a / in the Finder, then do an ls in Terminal, it will show up with a colon instead.
In any case, I actually renamed files to begin with a NUL in OS 9 to get them to sort to the beginning of a list. It's hard to enter one, though - I used BBEdit to put a NUL in a document by clicking insert from its ASCII table, then used copy/paste to get it into the file name. I felt dirty doing it, but it worked.
I think a big part of how the stock performs, and possibly somewhat how the company fares after Steve Jobs leaves depends on how he leaves. If he is suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer, is given two months to live, the stock will plummet. On the other hand, if he's able to leave on his own terms, and with a long transition time, things will probably be more stable. To some extent, this has already been happening, with Phil Schiller and others taking a bigger role in some of the keynotes over the last several years. Phil is no longer just the guy who falls 20 feet holding an iBook to demonstrate its Wifi connection; he narrates much longer parts of the presentation these days.
In a CPU-intensive application like this, multithreading always makes sense, even on a single-core system.
No, it doesn't. Performing a task in multiple threads always has some amount of communication overhead. Depending on the type of task being performed and the algorithm being used, that overhead can vary quite a bit. In any case, a multithreaded app will do at least a little bit more work, and in some of the worse cases, it might have a lot of conflicts over shared data, causing a significant slowdown. I'd expect to see anywhere from a couple percent performance hit all the way up to 50% less than an ideal speedup for a particularly bad application. The benefit of multithreading comes when you can be running multiple threads at once - so a 2-threaded app on one CPU might run at 0.95 times the speed of the same app when single-threaded... But, run it on two cores, and it runs at 1.9 times the speed of the single-threaded version. (waves hands, ignoring lots of variables)
Of course, there are a lot of variables - like is the single-threaded version actually doing the same thing? It might skip all the communication steps or mutex locking that a multithreaded application would do, or it might be doing them anyway. And the OS's scheduler and cache have an effect, too. If you have multiple threads fighting over one CPU (and its cache), they can slow each other down if the cache isn't large enough to hold the working set of both threads at the same time. The TLB can also suffer in the same way.
Moral of the story: it's an extremely rare application that will get a speedup on a single-core CPU (without simultaneous multithreading - hyperthreading is a lot like adding a second core).
It's true (at least anecdotally) that PCs can survive a couple hundred milliseconds... The main constraint we had was size. Any capacitors we added took away from board space we could use for useful logic. I believe the input was 48V, and the power supply would work with input down to maybe 32V or so - so we had to store almost twice the energy that we were going to be needing. Not to mention, finding capacitors with a high enough voltage rating and low enough height limits you to a much lower capacitance than is ideal. And even then, as I mentioned, it caused airflow problems.
Yes, but embedded systems usually have lower power requirements, or at the very least, a smaller range of power requirements. You can't add 3 PCIe cards, a few extra drives, and a few more GB of RAM to most embedded systems.
I worked on the design of an embedded system a few years ago that had a holdup spec - I think it was supposed to survive for 50 ms with no power. So a 50 ms power interruption would result in continued operation, while an outage longer than that was allowed to reset the board. However, the power draw on the board was around 200 Watts; being able to supply that much power for that long in a fairly compact form factor was a huge hurdle. It also caused airflow problems, because the giant capacitors would prevent air from getting to other components on the board, like the CPU. In the next version of the spec, I believe the holdup requirement was eliminated - apparently we weren't the only ones having trouble meeting that requirement.
I agree - find something that is particularly interesting for your son. In my case, I really learned programming in 9th grade. I had a TI-85 calculator, so I wrote several programs in TI-BASIC related to what I was learning in my math class at the time. I found it enjoyable because writing the program meant that I didn't have to do all the repetitive work in the homework assignments - I could plug the numbers into my program, and it would give me an answer. The teachers didn't mind, since they figured that if could write a program, I easily could do the same thing by hand.
The biggest benefit was several years later, when I wrote a program to calculate Riemann Sums (a way to approximate an integral). It would let the user input a function, an interval to calculate over, and the number of subdivisions to use. The user could choose left, right, middle, or trapezoidal approximation. It would even graph the function and show the areas used for the calculation. It was a fairly useful little program for one particular chapter of my math book - but even better, my teacher loved it. In exchange for giving her the code for the program, she gave me a perfect score on that chapter's test. There's no better reward for a kid than getting to skip out of a test!
The places that allow you to go net negative buy your power back at wholesale rates, which is far lower. If you think about it when you sell power back to the power company you're not competing with the power company, you're competing with the power generators. Why should the power company give you an unfair advantage there?
While it may be true that you sell at wholesale rates in many locations, it's not in my area.
First, I am in the utility's green power tomorrow [PDF warning!] program. That means that I pay $0.01 extra per kWh to fund renewable energy. The utility promises that they will purchase enough renewable energy to cover every kWh that is paid at the higher rate, in addition to the legally mandated 1.73% minimum renewable energy they buy. 99.9% of that comes from wind farms in 3 areas, the other 0.1% comes from local solar generation. That puts my total rate at about $0.14/kWh for last month (it goes up and down by a few pennies quite regularly).
For those that have solar arrays, the local power company will buyall your solar-generated electricity for $0.25/kWh, and then sell it back at the regular electric price, plus a $0.01 charge per kWh to be part of the same green power program that I am. So if you're using 5 kW and producing 5 kW, you're still getting paid! (Caveat: I believe the program is currently full, they have a cap on the total capacity.)
The way they can afford to do this is through the extra penny others are choosing to pay. Renewable power generally costs more than the coal, natural gas, or nuclear plants they replace. So they collect this extra amount, and buy more expensive electricity. It's worth noting that there are charges assessed per-day (around $11/month for me), so it's not exactly a brilliant money-making scheme. I also don't know if some of the other charges (like the charge for distribution service, paying for the wires between my house and the power plant) are counted as credits when selling power, if they are not assessed at all, or if they charge you for the distribution service no matter which way the electricity is traveling.
Anyway, I applaud the local utility, MG&E, for encouraging growth of renewable energy by providing programs both for buying and selling renewable energy.
Their "tricks" are to 1. have a hell of a lot of computation to be done, and 2. make sure that the work can be split into millions or billions of completely independent tasks. Then you send a few thousand tasks to each CPU, wait a while, and they all get done. Most interesting problems require some amount of communication or reduction or something that is not perfectly parallel - but there's nothing magical going on. If your computation is largely serial, there's not a whole heck of a lot that can be done when you're given a parallel architecture.
We have enough technology now to really reduce motor vehicle fatalities, yet we haven't implemented many of them.
I fear one reason is legal. What happens if one of these systems fails? Is the car company responsible for not applying the brakes when it failed to detect the stopped car ahead of you? There would probably be several other companies in the line of fire, for making the computer(s) involved, or writing the software. It's maybe not quite such a bad threat for a preventative technology (seat belts and airbags do a good job saving lives, and don't seem to be a huge point of liability, though they are admittedly simpler, and therefore easier to design to avoid catastrophic failure)...
But, imagine if you have an autonomous car. Sure, it can drive much faster than you could safely, and cars could be closer to each other. Cars could be designed to have far greater fuel efficiency and safety. But what happens when the computer running it crashes? One of the DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles a few years back had a memory leak during the competition. It was something they *should* have caught, but they never ran the vehicle for a long time without stopping before competition because there were so many other things to do to perfect the software. Anyway, mid-competition, the planning computer crashed, with the last instructions being to accelerate and turn slightly left (IIRC). The DARPA chase vehicle didn't hit the E-Stop button as soon as they probably should have - the pickup truck bounced off the road and through brush, knocking the tailgate loose, and finally stopping when the battery bounced out of the battery box.
Now, undoubtedly, a real computer system driving a car would have redundancy and be thoroughly tested, but you can never account for every possible problem - software or hardware. This is why I (unfortunately) doubt I will see widely available autonomous cars for public roads during my lifetime.
My AT&T wireless plan has about $6 of fees and taxes on the $80 main line, and $3 on the $30 iPhone (pre-3G) line ($20 for the iPhone, $10 for the extra line). There's also $4.30 tacked on for the $60 laptop data card. I do get a substantial discount through my employer, however, so I pay a decent amount less than the sum of those numbers.
My AT&T landline is even worse: the ad said phone service was as low as $9 or $10/month (roughly). Well, in my area, it turns out it's $12.55. Not too bad. But then I get my first bill, and there's a $5.09 "Federal Access Charge", a few other surcharges totaling $0.72, and taxes totaling $1.56. So my "$12.55" phone line actually costs $20.01/month. I'm not at all disappointed to be canceling my AT&T service in under a month. Oh, and then they raised the price a couple months ago: it's now $22.16. Did I mention that I (apparently) don't actually get any free calling on that line, either? I still have to pay per call (not much, admittedly, but given how often I use the phone, my total cost probably comes to about $15 per call.;-)) The only reason I have it is to use for rare long calls - local, toll-free, or incoming; any of which would cost minutes on my cell phone - so I don't burn through too many cell minutes. It was also useful (for sharing 56k modem access with my roommate.... yay.) when AT&T screwed up my DSL for days at a time.
I'd switch to cable, but Charter's even worse. I have the choice of which orifice I get #^*&*ed through, but it's coming to me no matter what direction I turn.
I'm at one of the schools mentioned in the article (Wisconsin), in a field overwhelmed with men - Electrical and Computer Engineering. The undergraduate EE side is around 11-12% female, while the Computer Engineering side is around 6-7%. Of the 16 faculty in the computer area, 2 are female, though both were hired in the last 10 years. The whole department has 6 female faculty, out of 49 total; either way, that's about 12% female. The women are all well-qualified for their positions, and the percentages seem reasonable (compared to undergrads, at least - the department doesn't publish the gender ratios of graduate students).
That's not to say that it doesn't need attention - it wasn't too long ago that there weren't ANY women in our College of Engineering. And I'm aware of at least one egregious case of sexual discrimination between faculty that happened a number of years ago, and was ignored by others in the department. Instead of trying to artificially create equality by any quota, people need to be educated. Look for discrimination and harassment against ANYBODY: male, female, black, white, Inuit... For hiring decisions, a quick independent verification should be able to show that the person hired for the job was at least on par with the other candidates in terms of hard qualifications. Make it easy to report trouble, and make sure they are taken seriously (but not abused). It's not a simple fix, but it's not a simple problem either.
That's at least part of it. Who is more likely to fill out a survey? The customer that's a rabid fanboi getting a chance to express his undying love for the company that he throws wads of cash at? Or the one who is pissed off because their ipod just broke? Yes, I kinda slanted the questions a bit, but you get the idea.
Actually, it's fairly well-established that a customer with a particularly poor experience will tell far more people about it than a customer with a particularly good experience. It's a lot like how people only post on an online forum when they're having trouble - hardly anybody goes to the effort of saying "I installed the latest update, and it worked perfectly!" Especially relative to the rate of success versus failure.
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Hey, I used an Apple Newton (remember those? Heck, ever even seen one?) to take notes in high school. I bought it used for $50. A friend of mine got a keyboard for his Newton to use when taking notes, and then also got an eMate - you could probably buy a half dozen of those for $100 these days. I believe somebody wrote a web browser for them a few years ago (believe it or not, development continues on an OS that has been dead 10 years - see also Amiga, C64, etc...). At the time, I used it for notes, calendars, games, and E-mail.
If you were dedicated, you could take notes on a cell phone - hopefully one with at least a half-decent keyboard. But yeah, you'd give up a lot of usability for the price. Of course, you will give up a lot of usability for a $100 laptop, too. In any case, I doubt most students would buy a $100 laptop. Sure, us students are cheap, but are we really THAT cheap? A $100 laptop is better for a developing country, where the alternative is nothing - and even then, it's still too expensive, as food is probably more important, and wages are far lower.
Or, you could buy a cell phone. Those can be had for ~$100+ in forms that do about as much as a $100 laptop would. Plus they call people.
In any case, it's no surprise - this has been possible for a long time. The question is whether the result is marketable. Will people want a 7-inch screen? Can they live with only 1 GB of storage? Each year, the specs of what you can buy with $100 get better - at this point, they're high enough that several companies think the product has become marketable.
Unfortunately, more cache is becoming a necessity. Throughput (of the CPU and memory) increases much faster than latency decreases. These days, it's not uncommon to have a latency of a thousand clock cycles if the CPU has to go all the way to memory to fetch something. Back then, the latency might've been tens of clock cycles. So yeah, it's way more than we used to have, but without it, your computer would feel like molasses.
My dad also continued working after "retirement," three days a week. It's something he enjoys, and keeps him busy. My grandma worked until the day she died at 82 years old - she taught people with dyslexia, and also taught teachers how to teach students who have dyslexia. She never did it for the money, she didn't ask for nearly as much payment as she could have if that were the case. She did it because she loved what she was doing, and because she was making a difference for people.
What a stupid summary: don't take a statistic and claim that the reason for its change is "quite evident." (Never mind that the article states that the *average* age is staying the same.) People work longer for many reasons, not just the financial aspects.
I too was there (like 2.5 years ago) and did not go on the rides. Partly due to the price, and partly because those I was with didn't want to go (because of the price, and since they weren't into Star Trek). The cost might've been less back then, but I'm not sure about that. It was fun to visit the gift shop and the bathrooms, at least.
On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that this move surprised many people. At least when I was there, it was absolutely dead. I had heard even back then that it was in danger of being closed. Still sad, though.
I'd bet that there are both leaded and lead-free versions of the part. That's not an uncommon option to have from a manufacturer. Where I used to work, many chips were going lead-free only, which caused troubles for our leaded designs (we were in communications, which had an exemption).
I used to work for an Apple Authorized Service Provider, and we probably marked up prices at least as much as Apple did - every part we bought from Apple got marked up a fair amount, and that's on top of the $60/hour, 1-hour minimum labor charge. Never mind that, at the peak, I was only getting $11/hour. On the other hand, Apple also has (had?) a flat-rate repair service. For roughly $350, they'd replace anything and everything on a laptop, excluding accidental damage/abuse (which could drive the price up to around $1100, if the screen was involved, or much less for less expensive parts). So that actually acted like a cap on the price of repairs - if we could repair it cheaper ourselves for the individual parts and labor (despite our markups), we would; else we'd send it in to Apple.
The prices certainly weren't reasonable for RAM, hard drives, and the like - but we sold third party upgrades instead of the "official" Apple service parts when the computer was past the warranty and needed repair. But for the parts prices from Apple, a lot of repairs weren't too unreasonable (though yes, some were horrendous).
I think where they are able to come ahead is by charging prices roughly equivalent to replacement costs, but then they get the old parts back, which they may be able to fix and reuse.
Unless you own an iMac, mine is in the shop (AGAIN!) for yet another circuit board and possibly new video card.
So that was the best $169 I ever spent.
I've got news for you - they wouldn't sell them if they were unprofitable. On a large scale, it's always a better deal for them than it is for you. But, for the individual, paying a couple hundred dollars might be better than the uncertainty.
But that doesn't stop me from pretty much always buying AppleCare. Though my Macs are also on the high end, and therefore more expensive to repair or replace. I'm not sure that would be true if I bought cheap Macs.
I'd rather have somebody who knows attack vectors try to build up defenses than somebody who has only been taught how to defend. It's the difference between giving a man a fish, and teaching him how to fish. The guy who knows how to build an attack will be able to think of new ways to attack - and new ways to defend. The one who has only been taught "don't let a buffer overflow happen, or somebody might somehow be able to attack your program" probably isn't going to fare very well when he's faced with a new type of attack.
One of my college courses included hacking into a Linux machine. The assignment included lots of handholding - enough to keep us pointed in the right direction, but leaving us to discover the details on our own. It included using a buffer overflow on an HTTP server to gain remote access, then a format string attack to get root, then writing a program to break out of the chroot jail. Now, the programs we were attacking were either explicitly written to be vulnerable, or perhaps modified or outdated versions of programs. The specific attacks we were using wouldn't be useful on a well-secured system, and that's the difference between my class and this one. But a malicious student could certainly take what he learned and act maliciously on his own in either case.
They mention that the computer lab is not externally networked - so those bulletin board attacks and password logging and such are obviously not real attacks, but well-contained. I think the real news here is that there's a journalist sensationalizing the details to make his article interesting. Oh, wait, that's not news. My mistake.
You can't just land and push because it would be very difficult to push it in the right direction. You'd have to push through the center of gravity to get it to move in a straight line (rather than just making it spin). Plus, the asteroid almost certainly is already spinning, so there's not a constant location one can put a thruster and have it be pushing in the right direction. Plus, according to an article linked to from TFA, the asteroid might be little more than a pile of rubble, meaning that attaching to it (and pushing it as a whole) would be difficult.
What I'd be interested to know is how this plan avoids negative effects from the gravity tractor: for example, to hold it a constant distance from the asteroid, the satellite would have to be using propellant. The propellant would have to be sent - you guessed it - in the direction of the asteroid. Then, the propellant hits the asteroid, and pushes it in the direction we DON'T want it to go. The net effect would probably not completely cancel out the satellite's effect, as some of the propellant would spread out and miss the asteroid, and some would change its spin - but when you're talking 0.22 microns per second, you probably want to get as much of that as possible... One could avoid this by spraying propellant out in a cone (with a large dead spot in the middle), but then you're using a lot more propellant.
As long as it's working fine at the moment, there's not much you can do. If it fails repeatedly while under warranty (especially with the same problem), you're likely to be able to talk your way into a replacement computer.
Apple does have a decent history of creating repair extension programs when there's a known and particularly nasty design defect, especially when another company owns up to it being their fault. I imagine especially in those cases, they get the third party to pay for some or all of the repair costs. However, if you're really worried about it, you might consider getting AppleCare just to give yourself the three years of warranty. Of course, AppleCare, like any extended warranty, is a large profit center - but many people (myself included) decide it's better to pay a few hundred dollars upfront than to risk an expensive repair (or an even more expensive replacement) later. On the other hand, the flat-rate repair service (which I assume they still offer) isn't that much more expensive than AppleCare, so as long as you don't need more than one repair in the 2nd or 3rd year, you might be better off just risking it.
But just to be clear - I'd personally expect that many of the computers might get covered by a repair extension, which often last to 3 years beyond the date of purchase. But that doesn't help at all if your computer exhibits a symptom other than what is expected for the particular failure covered; if your CPU fails, for example, you'd be on your own without the warranty.
Go one step further - sell your car. Get a decent bike, a rear rack, and some panniers. Maybe a sizable shoulder bag, too. I'll bike to the grocery store, buy a week's worth of groceries, and take them home. When I get there, I carry the bike and groceries up the stairs - luckily I only live one flight up, but I used to live 3 flights up. Plan some fun biking trips - find a campground 30 miles away, bike there on a Saturday, and back on Sunday. Be sure to have friends bike with you. When biking isn't feasible, use public transportation, or even rent a car for those rare occasions where it's necessary. And maybe you can't get away with selling your car - but if you at least minimize how much you use it, it'll help.
Also, find something fun to do outside. I like canoeing, especially somewhere absolutely isolated (though I bring a few close friends). Ultimate frisbee is also popular with the geeks. Find a recreational league, sign up for something fun (softball, soccer, volleyball). Or just take a walk around your neighborhood - walk down the roads you've never been on before.
I agree that exercising in a gym is unappealing. So camouflage your exercise as something else - a mode of transportation, playing a game, or a leisure activity. Especially if you do it with other people, so you don't feel like you're being watched.
I believe you meant to say *simultaneous* multithreading. You probably confused the name with *symmetric* multiprocessing (SMP, the fancy name for multiple identical CPUs). And it's still generically called SMT, Hyperthreading is just Intel's brand for it.
I have no specific knowledge to back this up, but I'd bet that they're doing something similar to the Sun Niagara (aka UltraSPARC T1). The cores in the Niagara are single-issue in-order. However, the hardware supports multiple threads, so it can pick any of them to issue an instruction on any particular cycle - if there's a data dependency or cache miss, it can fill what would otherwise be a pipeline bubble with an instruction from a different thread.
Basically, the Atom can use hyperthreading to keep the pipeline full instead of out-of-order execution. Out-of-order execution, simultaneous multithreading, and superscalar design are all independent design features.
Thank you for making it very clear that you are a Windows or Linux admin tasked with keeping the Macs running. I don't pretend to be an expert at Windows - I suggest you do the same around Macs, or learn more about them (having to use one helps, even though it's painful to get out of your comfortable habits).
That said, I doubt that there are many OS X Servers providing DNS services, but I am surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. Somebody needs to speed up that test and release cycle a bit...
One of the issues was the "Internet Sharing" buzz phrase. If you google that now, you'll find lots of warnings that if you enable this in OSX, it silently starts up a DHCP server.
...and Windows has a similar feature. I first encountered it (as a victim, not an admin) in about 2001. It can be a pain to figure out exactly which machine is doing it, but you ought to be able to tell pretty quickly that it's happening. When you don't have network access, you check the network settings - you find that there's a DHCP-assigned IP address that's not in the correct range. You should quickly figure that either your DHCP server is hosed, or there's a second one on your network.
The conventional answer you get from the OSX folks is to run the HFS+ file system, which supports case.
OK, you're getting your filesystems confused here. The default is HFS+ (aka Mac OS Extended), which is case-preserving and case-insensitive. That means that a file's upper and lower-case letters are always displayed as such, but you can't create a second file with the same name and different capitalization. There is a case-sensitive HFS+ (sometimes called HFSX), which is presumably what you switched to. It's not the default, so no surprise that the reformatted drive was case-insensitive. The ubiquitous recommendation is to always use the default HFS+ (Journaled) for the startup disk, and not the case-sensitive file systems (either case-sensitive HFS+ or UFS). Unless you really need it, use the default.
HFS is something else entirely, as others have noted.
So unless you know that you'll never want to copy directories full of files from a non-OSX machine, I'd advise against using OSX as a serious server.
Most people I know wouldn't run into an issue with case-insensitivity. It makes much more sense to differentiate your files by the name than by case. But the difference can be painful if you do.
(And you'll just get insults if you mention it here on /. ;-).
Hopefully I'm not interpreted as being insulting - I just hate it when someone is wrong on the internet. But do yourself and those you support a favor - if you support Macs, learn how to do it correctly. I'm sure you're a much better Windows/Linux/whatever admin than I would be, because that's what you know the best. You can get that good on a Mac too, but only if you're willing to invest the time.
(And I have occasionally wished that I could use '/' and NUL in file names. I wonder if there's a system that allows all 256 8-bit bytes in a file name... ;-)
HFS+ can do that. According to Wikipedia, allowed chars are "Unicode, any character, including NUL. OS APIs may limit some characters for legacy reasons." More specifically, : and / tend to be limited; in the OS 9 (and earlier) or OS X Finder, you can't use a colon, since that was used as the path delimiter. (In HFS, colon was prohibited, as it was reserved for that.) However, OS X goes through a few layers of translation - some layers use / as the delimiter instead. So if you name a file with a / in the Finder, then do an ls in Terminal, it will show up with a colon instead.
In any case, I actually renamed files to begin with a NUL in OS 9 to get them to sort to the beginning of a list. It's hard to enter one, though - I used BBEdit to put a NUL in a document by clicking insert from its ASCII table, then used copy/paste to get it into the file name. I felt dirty doing it, but it worked.
I think a big part of how the stock performs, and possibly somewhat how the company fares after Steve Jobs leaves depends on how he leaves. If he is suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer, is given two months to live, the stock will plummet. On the other hand, if he's able to leave on his own terms, and with a long transition time, things will probably be more stable. To some extent, this has already been happening, with Phil Schiller and others taking a bigger role in some of the keynotes over the last several years. Phil is no longer just the guy who falls 20 feet holding an iBook to demonstrate its Wifi connection; he narrates much longer parts of the presentation these days.
In a CPU-intensive application like this, multithreading always makes sense, even on a single-core system.
No, it doesn't. Performing a task in multiple threads always has some amount of communication overhead. Depending on the type of task being performed and the algorithm being used, that overhead can vary quite a bit. In any case, a multithreaded app will do at least a little bit more work, and in some of the worse cases, it might have a lot of conflicts over shared data, causing a significant slowdown. I'd expect to see anywhere from a couple percent performance hit all the way up to 50% less than an ideal speedup for a particularly bad application. The benefit of multithreading comes when you can be running multiple threads at once - so a 2-threaded app on one CPU might run at 0.95 times the speed of the same app when single-threaded... But, run it on two cores, and it runs at 1.9 times the speed of the single-threaded version. (waves hands, ignoring lots of variables)
Of course, there are a lot of variables - like is the single-threaded version actually doing the same thing? It might skip all the communication steps or mutex locking that a multithreaded application would do, or it might be doing them anyway. And the OS's scheduler and cache have an effect, too. If you have multiple threads fighting over one CPU (and its cache), they can slow each other down if the cache isn't large enough to hold the working set of both threads at the same time. The TLB can also suffer in the same way.
Moral of the story: it's an extremely rare application that will get a speedup on a single-core CPU (without simultaneous multithreading - hyperthreading is a lot like adding a second core).
It's true (at least anecdotally) that PCs can survive a couple hundred milliseconds... The main constraint we had was size. Any capacitors we added took away from board space we could use for useful logic. I believe the input was 48V, and the power supply would work with input down to maybe 32V or so - so we had to store almost twice the energy that we were going to be needing. Not to mention, finding capacitors with a high enough voltage rating and low enough height limits you to a much lower capacitance than is ideal. And even then, as I mentioned, it caused airflow problems.
This is old hat in embedded systems.
Yes, but embedded systems usually have lower power requirements, or at the very least, a smaller range of power requirements. You can't add 3 PCIe cards, a few extra drives, and a few more GB of RAM to most embedded systems.
I worked on the design of an embedded system a few years ago that had a holdup spec - I think it was supposed to survive for 50 ms with no power. So a 50 ms power interruption would result in continued operation, while an outage longer than that was allowed to reset the board. However, the power draw on the board was around 200 Watts; being able to supply that much power for that long in a fairly compact form factor was a huge hurdle. It also caused airflow problems, because the giant capacitors would prevent air from getting to other components on the board, like the CPU. In the next version of the spec, I believe the holdup requirement was eliminated - apparently we weren't the only ones having trouble meeting that requirement.
I agree - find something that is particularly interesting for your son. In my case, I really learned programming in 9th grade. I had a TI-85 calculator, so I wrote several programs in TI-BASIC related to what I was learning in my math class at the time. I found it enjoyable because writing the program meant that I didn't have to do all the repetitive work in the homework assignments - I could plug the numbers into my program, and it would give me an answer. The teachers didn't mind, since they figured that if could write a program, I easily could do the same thing by hand.
The biggest benefit was several years later, when I wrote a program to calculate Riemann Sums (a way to approximate an integral). It would let the user input a function, an interval to calculate over, and the number of subdivisions to use. The user could choose left, right, middle, or trapezoidal approximation. It would even graph the function and show the areas used for the calculation. It was a fairly useful little program for one particular chapter of my math book - but even better, my teacher loved it. In exchange for giving her the code for the program, she gave me a perfect score on that chapter's test. There's no better reward for a kid than getting to skip out of a test!
The places that allow you to go net negative buy your power back at wholesale rates, which is far lower. If you think about it when you sell power back to the power company you're not competing with the power company, you're competing with the power generators. Why should the power company give you an unfair advantage there?
While it may be true that you sell at wholesale rates in many locations, it's not in my area.
First, I am in the utility's green power tomorrow [PDF warning!] program. That means that I pay $0.01 extra per kWh to fund renewable energy. The utility promises that they will purchase enough renewable energy to cover every kWh that is paid at the higher rate, in addition to the legally mandated 1.73% minimum renewable energy they buy. 99.9% of that comes from wind farms in 3 areas, the other 0.1% comes from local solar generation. That puts my total rate at about $0.14/kWh for last month (it goes up and down by a few pennies quite regularly).
For those that have solar arrays, the local power company will buy all your solar-generated electricity for $0.25/kWh, and then sell it back at the regular electric price, plus a $0.01 charge per kWh to be part of the same green power program that I am. So if you're using 5 kW and producing 5 kW, you're still getting paid! (Caveat: I believe the program is currently full, they have a cap on the total capacity.)
The way they can afford to do this is through the extra penny others are choosing to pay. Renewable power generally costs more than the coal, natural gas, or nuclear plants they replace. So they collect this extra amount, and buy more expensive electricity. It's worth noting that there are charges assessed per-day (around $11/month for me), so it's not exactly a brilliant money-making scheme. I also don't know if some of the other charges (like the charge for distribution service, paying for the wires between my house and the power plant) are counted as credits when selling power, if they are not assessed at all, or if they charge you for the distribution service no matter which way the electricity is traveling.
Anyway, I applaud the local utility, MG&E, for encouraging growth of renewable energy by providing programs both for buying and selling renewable energy.
Their "tricks" are to 1. have a hell of a lot of computation to be done, and 2. make sure that the work can be split into millions or billions of completely independent tasks. Then you send a few thousand tasks to each CPU, wait a while, and they all get done. Most interesting problems require some amount of communication or reduction or something that is not perfectly parallel - but there's nothing magical going on. If your computation is largely serial, there's not a whole heck of a lot that can be done when you're given a parallel architecture.
We have enough technology now to really reduce motor vehicle fatalities, yet we haven't implemented many of them.
I fear one reason is legal. What happens if one of these systems fails? Is the car company responsible for not applying the brakes when it failed to detect the stopped car ahead of you? There would probably be several other companies in the line of fire, for making the computer(s) involved, or writing the software. It's maybe not quite such a bad threat for a preventative technology (seat belts and airbags do a good job saving lives, and don't seem to be a huge point of liability, though they are admittedly simpler, and therefore easier to design to avoid catastrophic failure)...
But, imagine if you have an autonomous car. Sure, it can drive much faster than you could safely, and cars could be closer to each other. Cars could be designed to have far greater fuel efficiency and safety. But what happens when the computer running it crashes? One of the DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles a few years back had a memory leak during the competition. It was something they *should* have caught, but they never ran the vehicle for a long time without stopping before competition because there were so many other things to do to perfect the software. Anyway, mid-competition, the planning computer crashed, with the last instructions being to accelerate and turn slightly left (IIRC). The DARPA chase vehicle didn't hit the E-Stop button as soon as they probably should have - the pickup truck bounced off the road and through brush, knocking the tailgate loose, and finally stopping when the battery bounced out of the battery box.
Now, undoubtedly, a real computer system driving a car would have redundancy and be thoroughly tested, but you can never account for every possible problem - software or hardware. This is why I (unfortunately) doubt I will see widely available autonomous cars for public roads during my lifetime.
My AT&T wireless plan has about $6 of fees and taxes on the $80 main line, and $3 on the $30 iPhone (pre-3G) line ($20 for the iPhone, $10 for the extra line). There's also $4.30 tacked on for the $60 laptop data card. I do get a substantial discount through my employer, however, so I pay a decent amount less than the sum of those numbers.
My AT&T landline is even worse: the ad said phone service was as low as $9 or $10/month (roughly). Well, in my area, it turns out it's $12.55. Not too bad. But then I get my first bill, and there's a $5.09 "Federal Access Charge", a few other surcharges totaling $0.72, and taxes totaling $1.56. So my "$12.55" phone line actually costs $20.01/month. I'm not at all disappointed to be canceling my AT&T service in under a month. Oh, and then they raised the price a couple months ago: it's now $22.16. Did I mention that I (apparently) don't actually get any free calling on that line, either? I still have to pay per call (not much, admittedly, but given how often I use the phone, my total cost probably comes to about $15 per call. ;-)) The only reason I have it is to use for rare long calls - local, toll-free, or incoming; any of which would cost minutes on my cell phone - so I don't burn through too many cell minutes. It was also useful (for sharing 56k modem access with my roommate.... yay.) when AT&T screwed up my DSL for days at a time.
I'd switch to cable, but Charter's even worse. I have the choice of which orifice I get #^*&*ed through, but it's coming to me no matter what direction I turn.
I'm at one of the schools mentioned in the article (Wisconsin), in a field overwhelmed with men - Electrical and Computer Engineering. The undergraduate EE side is around 11-12% female, while the Computer Engineering side is around 6-7%. Of the 16 faculty in the computer area, 2 are female, though both were hired in the last 10 years. The whole department has 6 female faculty, out of 49 total; either way, that's about 12% female. The women are all well-qualified for their positions, and the percentages seem reasonable (compared to undergrads, at least - the department doesn't publish the gender ratios of graduate students).
That's not to say that it doesn't need attention - it wasn't too long ago that there weren't ANY women in our College of Engineering. And I'm aware of at least one egregious case of sexual discrimination between faculty that happened a number of years ago, and was ignored by others in the department. Instead of trying to artificially create equality by any quota, people need to be educated. Look for discrimination and harassment against ANYBODY: male, female, black, white, Inuit... For hiring decisions, a quick independent verification should be able to show that the person hired for the job was at least on par with the other candidates in terms of hard qualifications. Make it easy to report trouble, and make sure they are taken seriously (but not abused). It's not a simple fix, but it's not a simple problem either.
That's at least part of it. Who is more likely to fill out a survey? The customer that's a rabid fanboi getting a chance to express his undying love for the company that he throws wads of cash at? Or the one who is pissed off because their ipod just broke? Yes, I kinda slanted the questions a bit, but you get the idea.
Actually, it's fairly well-established that a customer with a particularly poor experience will tell far more people about it than a customer with a particularly good experience. It's a lot like how people only post on an online forum when they're having trouble - hardly anybody goes to the effort of saying "I installed the latest update, and it worked perfectly!" Especially relative to the rate of success versus failure.