These aren't the first people to try something like this. People used to post instructions on buying various 3rd party PPC boards to build your own Mac.
The interesting part of this is that they have vowed to challenge Apple's EULA in court if (he he he, "if") they get sued. The outcome of that battle will be interesting. I want to say I'm on Apple's side on this one (they should get to say "only on Macs"), but a big part of me hates all the crazy restrictions in EULAs and I'm sure if Apple wasn't in a minority position I'd be crying foul over that clause as monopolistic.
The somewhat sad part is that this could satisfy quite a bit of the complains I've seen on/. and other places asking for an upgradeable Mac that costs less than the Mac Pro. Yet the hobbled the default configuration with integrated graphics. I also enjoy the bits I've read about this where they recommend AGAINST installing OS X updates until they say it's OK because it could easily hose the system.
All and all, while I don't expect this to go anywhere, it will be amusing to watch.
It's not a finishing, but an acceptance. When people get into this kind of mode, their progress through the grieving process stops. It's easy to make your whole life about this, and you get stuck in that pain and unhappiness.
Say she wins this. Say she gets a constitutional amendment to ban these kinds of additives forever. Where does that leave her?
She won't have her kid back. She won't have her adopted mission of getting rid of this stuff and making things "right" because she will have done that. She'll either move on (which she could do now, probably with some good counseling), find a new cause (cure autism, and be in the same state forever), or she can be purposeless and become more depressed.
People in these situations don't want to deal with reality (in this case, that her kid is autistic and there is nothing she can do) so she is doing everything she can to focus on something she thinks she can control: this battle.
What she is doing she is either doing out of mental illness (unlikely), or a ton of pain (most probable). It's rather sad. Even more sad is the people taking advantage of her and others like her.
I see that this is really the media's fault, to a large degree.
We got really flimsy evidence of this link, which they trumpeted (because it was "sexy" and brought in eyeballs). When these studies were basically proven false, they got very little mention.
So now what you see is every once in a while a story is done about these things. They show some doctor saying "that's nonsense, you should be more afraid of scarlet fever." Then you see 4 crying mothers talking about how doctors ruined her kid's life. They are given equal weight.
So people don't get the right picture. They get a skewed one. They glamorize the "poor mothers" who get outpourings of grief. They play on people's fears. They don't deal with the elephant in the room.
The people who do these kinds of suits are either really stupid, or not finished grieving. The people that take it this far (make sites devoted to it, sue everyone involved, etc) are quite probably just in the "anger" stage of grief. They are looking for anyone or anything to blame so that it's not their fault, it's not random, etc. People prefer concrete incorrect answers (it's the mercury) to abstract correct answers (some kids just develop that way).
They don't talk about how these kind of things could be because of grief. They don't talk about how there is basically no evidence. They try to get viewers. The lawyers go for the long shot cash and the good publicity. Both are taking advantage of people operating out of grief.
Silent Spring was a crock in the overreaction that followed the book.
We went from spraying DDT on everything, to nothing.
There are films from the 40s and 50s where trucks would just drive down neighborhoods spraying DDT. They'd do it at public pools. No one thought anything of it. We way over used DDT.
In the wake of the book, people overreacted and moved to basically ban DDT outright. Instead of spraying in a controlled manner (such as, say, only where mosquitoes are a problem), we stopped spraying it altogether despite the fact that it was incredibly effective and cheap.
The book it's self was fine. As I remember Rachel Carson didn't argue to ban DDT but to be much more responsible in it's use. That really isn't what happened. It's that legacy (overreaction causing serious other problems) that people generally mean when they talk about Silent Spring being a crock.
Does anyone know of a tiny GPS logger that could be used for tracking cats?
I have a co-worker who has a couple of outdoor cats, and one often goes on trips for a day or longer, not coming home. When he comes back she wonders where he has been (and the rest of us are a little curious as this seems to happen relatively often).
I would be great to have a little GPS logger that would just keep track of where he had been so we could try to see what he's been up to. The device mentioned in the article is interested, but it's quite expensive (due to the active nature requiring the monthly subscription). The other devices I've seen are either custom built or not very small (more like standard GPS handheld size).
Does anyone know of any small (small enough to put on a grown cat) and inexpensive (under $200) boxes that would fit the bill?
Pet tracking would be quite a bit of fun, especially with pets that seem like they might have a large home range they run around. Heck, it's geocaching with a moving target!
OK, I missed something. I don't know if anyone else did because it the summary wasn't clear to me.
This thing is not an actual floppy drive with some flash storage built in, which is what I thought (and a somewhat stupid idea). It's a standard flash drive that is capable of identifying it's self like a floppy drive so that Windows will find it when looking for a floppy drive.
That's actually a very smart idea.
With that detail this this is not a real floppy drive of any kind, this all makes more sense. Question withdrawn.
I hadn't thought of that case. That's a good point. I was thinking of more common libraries like the basic Win32 graphics stuff that pretty much every program uses.
However, very little information has been presented with regards to the performance of Windows 7, this article however shall change that.
No numbers. No estimations. Just some hand waving of "they are doing something different". The article doesn't change that fact at all.
Competitors complained that offering internet and media solutions with the operating system harmed competition in the marketplace (despite other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux apparently being immune from such criticism)
Because OS X and Linux aren't de facto monopolies with 80%+ of the market.
In response to this, Microsoft made fundamental changes to the way Windows Vista was linked together [... this] also led to performance issues due to the increased number of libraries which comprise the operating system.
Yes, because loading 1 MB of code as part of one executable is vastly faster than loading it as 1 MB of library. This is especially true when loading 10+ different executables that have the same code statically linked in. That is way faster than loading it once. More efficient too.
No, wait...
Besides, that code (such as MSHTML.DLL) was already an external library. Just about every operating system tends to get new libraries with major upgrades. Windows was not one monolithic executable before. Heck, it wasn't way back in the 3.11 days.
However, Windows' lure has always been that applications from older versions of Windows are almost guaranteed to work post-upgrade; this is in contrast to older UNIX solutions where upgrading the system could render old applications useless without access to the source code.
That has not always been the lure. The lure was it was pretty and not a DOS prompt. Then the lure was simply that there were more programs for it when it became dominant. But then again, Leopard runs programs designed for Tiger and before. OS 9 ran programs designed for OS 7. Just about every OS does that, including many UNIXes.
During Apple's death throes back at the start of the decade, Steve Jobs made a bold decision; to replace the old, proven Mac OS lineage with a UNIX-based platform running a custom GUI.
You've GOT to be kidding. "Proven" for OS 9? It didn't have memory protection. It didn't have preemptive multitasking. Heck, you still had to pre-allocate memory to programs at launch, didn't you? It was a fine OS design for 1992. It didn't work so well in 2000. It was a weight around Apple's neck and would have killed them if they didn't try to escape. It needed to updated, and previous projects had failed. A clean break was a very smart decision.
Mac OS X was such a success - despite breaking backwards compatibility - that many customers were willing to put up with Apple's hardware, which ranked far below Wintel solutions in terms of performance, in order to obtain the hardware-locked user experience of their new flagship operating system.
This is somewhat true, (quite on the laptop side later in life with the G4s), but it's also highly troll. "...in order to obtain the hardware-locked user experience of their new flagship operating system"? That's unnecessary.
Apple took an unorthodox approach in order to offer Mac OS 9 users the ability to retain their existing software while still upgrading to the improved Mac OS X experience; the virtual machine. Essentially, Mac OS X contained 3 separate application environments; Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic.
It's not like anyone had ever thought of that before. If only Windows had a virtual environment in it. Maybe since 95. It could have run old DOS programs. Oh, wait, it did. Then there was WoW, Windows on Windows, that let 95 and up run old Win16 programs. Emulating older stuff is a common way of handling it.
I understand why they did it, to a degree. Making touchscreen that large is probably very tough.
My point was that Apple engineered a complete little device in a short amount of time, and Microsoft pieced a bunch of off the shelf hardware together in a empty box and decided to charge $10k for it.
It's simply that Microsoft took the easy way out, engineering wise, compared to what Apple had to go through to get their touchscreen right. MS's job wasn't easy. I'm just questioning the amount of time and money it took.
So you think it was easier to make a full, working, cell phone, that thin. Even through it had a revolutionary interface, had to be approved by AT&T, sold to actual customers, OKed by the FCC, etc.
Microsoft just had to say "we're going to sell this, it's experimental".
Apple doing a full consumer product had a tougher time.
Microsoft developed a big box with a sheet of glass on top using a projector, an off the shelf PC, and a few cameras. No weight problems. No power problems. No big size problems. It costs $10,000.
Apple developed a small, thin device. It uses custom circuits and such, and has to run for hours on a little battery. It cost $600 (which gave them a nice profit).
I think Apple could have made the iPhone bigger if they wanted to. Who had the tougher task between the two groups? Apple.
I still think Roughly Drafted had it right in a post last year.
Surface took longer, was more expensive, and is uglier than the iPhone. The iPhone uses real touch sensitivity, while Surface uses cameras and a projection screen. Surface had interesting tricks like identifying objects, but it did that through essentially 8 dot bar codes.
So here we are, a year later. Surface has been no where to be seen. It is now coming to 4 AT&T stores in large cities, where it will do next to nothing.
You can compare phones. Neat. A normal kiosk could do that (as the article points out). The more interesting abilities of Surface (like collaboration and such) won't come out in that. You can only compare two phones at once? There are only 8 or the (what, 20+) phones AT&T sells that will work with it? And how long before people steal some of the special phones (with the magic bar codes or whatever) thus rendering it a big expensive table? Or will those phones be tied up with leashes also?
It's a semi-interesting technology, that isn't going anywhere because of the management. Is anyone surprised? This is how basically every tech demo ends up. We never see it, or it gets managed to death.
They should have just started selling them to the (business) public at a high price with an SDK and just let people figure it out.
A tax is something you have to pay. It is entirely possible to drive, for years, without getting a single ticket. I've done it.
It's only a tax on the poor of those particular people can't drive. If that's the case, then I don't mind. The system should discourage those who can't drive from driving.
Should it be based on your income? That's fine with me. But don't call it a tax.
Depends on your OS. My Mac has 2 gigs, so I never have to worry about it. Even if I have Parallels open and using 768MB or 1GB, it's fine.
XP is different.
Way back in the 9x days, I used a little program called MemTurbo (by Silicon Prairie Software, I think). It made a HUGE difference in system performance. Windows was just terrible at managing memory. MemTurbo would defrag your memory so that larger chunks were available. You could trigger it yourself, or have it trigger when a certain amount of memory was used. It was especially useful before or after a big task that used tons of memory like playing a game. It made the system feel almost as good as a reboot.
It hasn't been needed, in my experience, since I switched to 2000. They offered a version, but it didn't make much difference. Windows 2000 was much better. But there are still problems.
Windows likes to swap things out to disk. It loves to swap things to disk. So what I've noticed is that I can destroy my box with MySQL pretty easily. I have 2 GB, but it doesn't matter. Running a large query, preferably one that is poorly written, will load up tons of data into memory as it goes through it's process. When the query is done, or if I abort the query, things stay dead. The disks just swap and swap.
Any sufficiently large process will do this. Having Java run on tons of data, or Eclipse (given extra memory) with a plugin with a bad memory leak.
Close things, let them go, force quit them, whatever. I can stop the MySQL server and unload it entirely from memory. Things still page in and out of disk all the time. It can go for at least an hour or two. By that point I almost always reset because it is so bad on productivity.
I've had FireFox trigger this once or twice, when I forgot to close it for a few days. I make sure to completely close FF every night, so it never swells that large and doesn't start causing problems.
Memory still matters for some of us, despite the fact that we have enough it should never matter.
It's nice they have fixed things (I hear the jemalloc, if that was the right name, was a big help). It hasn't been a problem for me, but I know how it can be for others.
At this point, that's basically what WebKit is. If someone just makes a Windows front end, we'll be set. Getting Google to adopt it for Google Desktop would be great, but at this point I find that unlikely due to momentum. Dashboard is just little Safari windows, hiding things like the title bar, with a special Javascript object to let you do things like set preferences, flip sides, and know when your widget is shown.
This this version of KDE is supposed to be able to be compiled and run on Window much easier than the giant mess that used to be necessary (my understanding is that this is due mostly to QT4), we may even be most of the way there. All that is needed is to get the users. Being able to say "use Apple Dashboard widgets" would be a major plus in getting the users.
If it wouldn't cut into one of Apple's argued advantages, they would probably release Dashboard for Windows.
But as it stands, there doesn't seem to be any way develop a widget and have it run on any decent fraction of the Windows computers out there. Like it or not, that's a large market.
I've recently been able to do some widget development for OS X (nothing complex, just some HTML, JS, and AJAX calls). It's a neat little environment but the error reporting left a lot to be desired.
That said, I really appreciate the ability to open Dashboard widgets in KDE. The interface isn't that magical, and except for the ability to call native code shouldn't pose much of a problem for the developers. I was wondering if they were going to do something like this and I'm glad they have.
The little widget I developed could be used by users of one of our applications. I think a fair number of them would like it. For various reasons, 30% of the users of this application are using Macs, so that doesn't pose a problem. But when I pitched the idea (with a mostly complete widget) to my superiors they weren't that interested. I was basically told "that's quite neat, but it needs to work on Windows."
Ignoring my minor "let Mac users have something first" attitude, there is a very serious problem with providing the Widget on Windows. I can't (reasonably). I researched the options and here is what I found.
Vista Gadget - Only works on Vista, about 20% of our users... and I don't have a copy of Vista to develop on
Google Widget - Depending on how you write it, works on Google desktop or only Google Homepage (and other sites). Google Desktop runs on Windows, OS X, and (I think) Linux
Yahoo! Widget - Used to be Konfabulator. Runs on Windows and OS X.
That list ignores whatever GNOME uses, and the 5-10 smaller engines that very few people use. Who knows how many people use Google Desktop or Yahoo! Widgets. None of the widgets developed on these systems works with any of the other system. Even if the widget is a simple as a "Hello, world" HTML file and image(s), the markup between Dashboard and Google is quite different. From the quick look I put into it, the same thing is true with Vista and Yahoo!. Google Desktop widgets can be loaded into the Dashboard, if you have Google Desktop installed on your Mac, because it performs some kind of translation.
So I can't develop a widget. The only user base I can promise is Vista. That's a big headache and only 2/3s the side of the Mac users we know of. Asking users to go install Google Desktop or Yahoo! Widgets just to be able to view our little widget is a little tough. Making the application native would take quite a bit of time. Integration for a custom Google homepage is probably the best option for us, but still not worth it due to the inability to predict the number of people who would actually use it.
So the project (which was just a side project of mine) is basically dead. Unless they decide that providing the widget to only Mac users (I find this very unlikely), the time isn't judged to be worth it (and I don't blame them). Until Vista takes over (probably by this time next year due to MS phasing out XP sales to OEMs) there are just too many widget engines. Targeting any decent sized group of users is nearly impossible. It's a quirk of our market that Macs have the market share they do.
This kind of consolidation is a very nice thing. As a KDE user, instantly getting so many widgets available (since outside of native code and possibly running shell commands, there shouldn't be porting) is a very nice thing.
Write a short story. Write a slightly longer story. Write the story in rhyming verse. Write a non-fictional story. Write this story. Write that story. Writing assignments look boring to me. However, I saw challenges and differences in the engineering stuff I did. Maybe this guy is just ignorant of the necessary knowledge to see those differences.
Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
Why chose a major you have to work for where you can find correct answers, when you can have one where you just have to BS enough that the teacher can't tell the difference between BS and insight? Clearly, you should just chose you major based on your possible GPA. I know they hire CEOs based on what their GPA was 30+ years ago.
Dearth of Quality Counseling
Really? I had some wicked smart professors who could help with this. And I heard plenty from other students who thought this kind of thing about their non-engineering courses. I smell an anecdote.
Professors are Rarely Encouraging
I had encouraging professors. I had interesting professors. I also had boring professors. Why is that every Engineering professor is a stodgy old bore, while the Lit students get class after class of Dead Poet's Society teachers? Oh, that's right, they don't. Besides, maybe if you were interested in the material instead of in it for the $$$, you wouldn't have this problem. You've never seen a teacher engage some students who are interested in the subject, while called terrible by the students who didn't care about the subject? I've seen that since at least middle school.
Awful Textbooks
My Literature textbooks weren't very good at all. I've seen history books that were a joke. There were almost no good textbooks. Blame the publishers, blame the teachers requiring their own text book, blame the difficulty of writing a good one. Again, Engineering shouldn't be singled out
I call blog spam on this. You notice it's just a blog entry, not a real story at Wired.
I saw that. I say... wrong. The prices went up. That's economics. There are two resons.
The closest substitute good (HD-DVD players/software) is now gone
Development
People were pushing the players at a loss (Toshiba, et. all too, from my understanding). Now that the pressure is gone, the prices have moved from the dumping range to the "possibly sustainable" range.
I've seen people complain about the new players being more expensive than the old ones, but that always happens when the new players have more features (BD-Live and all it's costs like Ethernet, flash storage, etc) than the old ones.
They're not "leveraging a monopoly", they are just not competing at/near a loss anymore. You can't leverage a Blu-Ray monopoly, because there is no market share for it right now. DVDs will be the "monopoly" in the video market for a few years yet.
I would not be surprised to find a new coalition of HD-DVD-interested companies form to create a new, open, set of technologies to compete with Blue-ray and bring that rampaging giant down.
Sarcasm: Yes. That worked so well the last time. I'm sure they'll try it again with yet another incompatible format.
Development costs, testing costs, update costs (look how many updates the Blu-Ray player on the PS3 has received), shipping costs, inventory costs, shelf space costs, etc.
I always figured that MS rushed the 360 HD-DVD so that they could have something out there to help counter the Blu-Ray install base generated by the PS3. Something to give their HDi some installed base to compete with the Java on Blu-Ray.
It doesn't surprise me at all that they wouldn't make a Blu-Ray drive. Even without that point, an HD drive doesn't add to the console's value as much as it did when all players were $600+. As players get cheaper, the reason to buy the add-on over a stand along player drops.
You don't even need that. One diode and some high impedance headphones is all you need. You don't even need any kind of power. There is no amplification, but I dare you to find one other broadcast technology that can draw all the power it needs from the signal its self.
Even if we switch off of AM and FM and such to fancy digital encodings, every radio should have the ability to tune into old-fashioned AM signals built in. It's trivial to add, and functions no matter what if they need to put stations up in an emergency.
I agree it's quite unlikely. I don't think it would happen either. Still, it would be very interesting if we were to find it. Despite the rarity not really changing the outcome, how many millions of people have been convicted through fingerprints around the world? We're pretty darn sure about this, so if it were to be disproved it would be very interesting to watch.
I agree though. I believe they are unique. If they weren't, we would probably see it in identical twins. Since we don't, that means they are probably random. To find two people sharing one print would be amazing. A combination of 2 or more would almost certainly be statistically impossible.
Figures I'd find this after I posted. According to this page, AFIS (which is international) only holds 17 million prints (1.7 million people). So a US database would be over 175x as big.
Slashdot Mirror
These aren't the first people to try something like this. People used to post instructions on buying various 3rd party PPC boards to build your own Mac.
The interesting part of this is that they have vowed to challenge Apple's EULA in court if (he he he, "if") they get sued. The outcome of that battle will be interesting. I want to say I'm on Apple's side on this one (they should get to say "only on Macs"), but a big part of me hates all the crazy restrictions in EULAs and I'm sure if Apple wasn't in a minority position I'd be crying foul over that clause as monopolistic.
The somewhat sad part is that this could satisfy quite a bit of the complains I've seen on /. and other places asking for an upgradeable Mac that costs less than the Mac Pro. Yet the hobbled the default configuration with integrated graphics. I also enjoy the bits I've read about this where they recommend AGAINST installing OS X updates until they say it's OK because it could easily hose the system.
All and all, while I don't expect this to go anywhere, it will be amusing to watch.
It's not a finishing, but an acceptance. When people get into this kind of mode, their progress through the grieving process stops. It's easy to make your whole life about this, and you get stuck in that pain and unhappiness.
Say she wins this. Say she gets a constitutional amendment to ban these kinds of additives forever. Where does that leave her?
She won't have her kid back. She won't have her adopted mission of getting rid of this stuff and making things "right" because she will have done that. She'll either move on (which she could do now, probably with some good counseling), find a new cause (cure autism, and be in the same state forever), or she can be purposeless and become more depressed.
People in these situations don't want to deal with reality (in this case, that her kid is autistic and there is nothing she can do) so she is doing everything she can to focus on something she thinks she can control: this battle.
What she is doing she is either doing out of mental illness (unlikely), or a ton of pain (most probable). It's rather sad. Even more sad is the people taking advantage of her and others like her.
I see that this is really the media's fault, to a large degree.
We got really flimsy evidence of this link, which they trumpeted (because it was "sexy" and brought in eyeballs). When these studies were basically proven false, they got very little mention.
So now what you see is every once in a while a story is done about these things. They show some doctor saying "that's nonsense, you should be more afraid of scarlet fever." Then you see 4 crying mothers talking about how doctors ruined her kid's life. They are given equal weight.
So people don't get the right picture. They get a skewed one. They glamorize the "poor mothers" who get outpourings of grief. They play on people's fears. They don't deal with the elephant in the room.
The people who do these kinds of suits are either really stupid, or not finished grieving. The people that take it this far (make sites devoted to it, sue everyone involved, etc) are quite probably just in the "anger" stage of grief. They are looking for anyone or anything to blame so that it's not their fault, it's not random, etc. People prefer concrete incorrect answers (it's the mercury) to abstract correct answers (some kids just develop that way).
They don't talk about how these kind of things could be because of grief. They don't talk about how there is basically no evidence. They try to get viewers. The lawyers go for the long shot cash and the good publicity. Both are taking advantage of people operating out of grief.
Silent Spring was a crock in the overreaction that followed the book.
We went from spraying DDT on everything, to nothing.
There are films from the 40s and 50s where trucks would just drive down neighborhoods spraying DDT. They'd do it at public pools. No one thought anything of it. We way over used DDT.
In the wake of the book, people overreacted and moved to basically ban DDT outright. Instead of spraying in a controlled manner (such as, say, only where mosquitoes are a problem), we stopped spraying it altogether despite the fact that it was incredibly effective and cheap.
The book it's self was fine. As I remember Rachel Carson didn't argue to ban DDT but to be much more responsible in it's use. That really isn't what happened. It's that legacy (overreaction causing serious other problems) that people generally mean when they talk about Silent Spring being a crock.
Does anyone know of a tiny GPS logger that could be used for tracking cats?
I have a co-worker who has a couple of outdoor cats, and one often goes on trips for a day or longer, not coming home. When he comes back she wonders where he has been (and the rest of us are a little curious as this seems to happen relatively often).
I would be great to have a little GPS logger that would just keep track of where he had been so we could try to see what he's been up to. The device mentioned in the article is interested, but it's quite expensive (due to the active nature requiring the monthly subscription). The other devices I've seen are either custom built or not very small (more like standard GPS handheld size).
Does anyone know of any small (small enough to put on a grown cat) and inexpensive (under $200) boxes that would fit the bill?
Pet tracking would be quite a bit of fun, especially with pets that seem like they might have a large home range they run around. Heck, it's geocaching with a moving target!
OK, I missed something. I don't know if anyone else did because it the summary wasn't clear to me.
This thing is not an actual floppy drive with some flash storage built in, which is what I thought (and a somewhat stupid idea). It's a standard flash drive that is capable of identifying it's self like a floppy drive so that Windows will find it when looking for a floppy drive.
That's actually a very smart idea.
With that detail this this is not a real floppy drive of any kind, this all makes more sense. Question withdrawn.
That makes sense. But why would I want a flash drive built into it also?
If I want a flash drive, I want it to be smaller than a floppy drive.
If I want a floppy drive, then I'm using floppies and don't need the flash storage.
I hadn't thought of that case. That's a good point. I was thinking of more common libraries like the basic Win32 graphics stuff that pretty much every program uses.
No numbers. No estimations. Just some hand waving of "they are doing something different". The article doesn't change that fact at all.
Because OS X and Linux aren't de facto monopolies with 80%+ of the market.
Yes, because loading 1 MB of code as part of one executable is vastly faster than loading it as 1 MB of library. This is especially true when loading 10+ different executables that have the same code statically linked in. That is way faster than loading it once. More efficient too.
No, wait...
Besides, that code (such as MSHTML.DLL) was already an external library. Just about every operating system tends to get new libraries with major upgrades. Windows was not one monolithic executable before. Heck, it wasn't way back in the 3.11 days.
That has not always been the lure. The lure was it was pretty and not a DOS prompt. Then the lure was simply that there were more programs for it when it became dominant. But then again, Leopard runs programs designed for Tiger and before. OS 9 ran programs designed for OS 7. Just about every OS does that, including many UNIXes.
You've GOT to be kidding. "Proven" for OS 9? It didn't have memory protection. It didn't have preemptive multitasking. Heck, you still had to pre-allocate memory to programs at launch, didn't you? It was a fine OS design for 1992. It didn't work so well in 2000. It was a weight around Apple's neck and would have killed them if they didn't try to escape. It needed to updated, and previous projects had failed. A clean break was a very smart decision.
This is somewhat true, (quite on the laptop side later in life with the G4s), but it's also highly troll. "...in order to obtain the hardware-locked user experience of their new flagship operating system"? That's unnecessary.
It's not like anyone had ever thought of that before. If only Windows had a virtual environment in it. Maybe since 95. It could have run old DOS programs. Oh, wait, it did. Then there was WoW, Windows on Windows, that let 95 and up run old Win16 programs. Emulating older stuff is a common way of handling it.
I understand why they did it, to a degree. Making touchscreen that large is probably very tough.
My point was that Apple engineered a complete little device in a short amount of time, and Microsoft pieced a bunch of off the shelf hardware together in a empty box and decided to charge $10k for it.
It's simply that Microsoft took the easy way out, engineering wise, compared to what Apple had to go through to get their touchscreen right. MS's job wasn't easy. I'm just questioning the amount of time and money it took.
So you think it was easier to make a full, working, cell phone, that thin. Even through it had a revolutionary interface, had to be approved by AT&T, sold to actual customers, OKed by the FCC, etc.
Microsoft just had to say "we're going to sell this, it's experimental".
Apple doing a full consumer product had a tougher time.
Yep.
Microsoft developed a big box with a sheet of glass on top using a projector, an off the shelf PC, and a few cameras. No weight problems. No power problems. No big size problems. It costs $10,000.
Apple developed a small, thin device. It uses custom circuits and such, and has to run for hours on a little battery. It cost $600 (which gave them a nice profit).
I think Apple could have made the iPhone bigger if they wanted to. Who had the tougher task between the two groups? Apple.
I still think Roughly Drafted had it right in a post last year.
Surface took longer, was more expensive, and is uglier than the iPhone. The iPhone uses real touch sensitivity, while Surface uses cameras and a projection screen. Surface had interesting tricks like identifying objects, but it did that through essentially 8 dot bar codes.
So here we are, a year later. Surface has been no where to be seen. It is now coming to 4 AT&T stores in large cities, where it will do next to nothing.
You can compare phones. Neat. A normal kiosk could do that (as the article points out). The more interesting abilities of Surface (like collaboration and such) won't come out in that. You can only compare two phones at once? There are only 8 or the (what, 20+) phones AT&T sells that will work with it? And how long before people steal some of the special phones (with the magic bar codes or whatever) thus rendering it a big expensive table? Or will those phones be tied up with leashes also?
It's a semi-interesting technology, that isn't going anywhere because of the management. Is anyone surprised? This is how basically every tech demo ends up. We never see it, or it gets managed to death.
They should have just started selling them to the (business) public at a high price with an SDK and just let people figure it out.
A tax is something you have to pay. It is entirely possible to drive, for years, without getting a single ticket. I've done it.
It's only a tax on the poor of those particular people can't drive. If that's the case, then I don't mind. The system should discourage those who can't drive from driving.
Should it be based on your income? That's fine with me. But don't call it a tax.
Depends on your OS. My Mac has 2 gigs, so I never have to worry about it. Even if I have Parallels open and using 768MB or 1GB, it's fine.
XP is different.
Way back in the 9x days, I used a little program called MemTurbo (by Silicon Prairie Software, I think). It made a HUGE difference in system performance. Windows was just terrible at managing memory. MemTurbo would defrag your memory so that larger chunks were available. You could trigger it yourself, or have it trigger when a certain amount of memory was used. It was especially useful before or after a big task that used tons of memory like playing a game. It made the system feel almost as good as a reboot.
It hasn't been needed, in my experience, since I switched to 2000. They offered a version, but it didn't make much difference. Windows 2000 was much better. But there are still problems.
Windows likes to swap things out to disk. It loves to swap things to disk. So what I've noticed is that I can destroy my box with MySQL pretty easily. I have 2 GB, but it doesn't matter. Running a large query, preferably one that is poorly written, will load up tons of data into memory as it goes through it's process. When the query is done, or if I abort the query, things stay dead. The disks just swap and swap.
Any sufficiently large process will do this. Having Java run on tons of data, or Eclipse (given extra memory) with a plugin with a bad memory leak.
Close things, let them go, force quit them, whatever. I can stop the MySQL server and unload it entirely from memory. Things still page in and out of disk all the time. It can go for at least an hour or two. By that point I almost always reset because it is so bad on productivity.
I've had FireFox trigger this once or twice, when I forgot to close it for a few days. I make sure to completely close FF every night, so it never swells that large and doesn't start causing problems.
Memory still matters for some of us, despite the fact that we have enough it should never matter.
It's nice they have fixed things (I hear the jemalloc, if that was the right name, was a big help). It hasn't been a problem for me, but I know how it can be for others.
Perhaps that did check the link, and thought the Informative would be funnier than the Funny.
At this point, that's basically what WebKit is. If someone just makes a Windows front end, we'll be set. Getting Google to adopt it for Google Desktop would be great, but at this point I find that unlikely due to momentum. Dashboard is just little Safari windows, hiding things like the title bar, with a special Javascript object to let you do things like set preferences, flip sides, and know when your widget is shown.
This this version of KDE is supposed to be able to be compiled and run on Window much easier than the giant mess that used to be necessary (my understanding is that this is due mostly to QT4), we may even be most of the way there. All that is needed is to get the users. Being able to say "use Apple Dashboard widgets" would be a major plus in getting the users.
If it wouldn't cut into one of Apple's argued advantages, they would probably release Dashboard for Windows.
But as it stands, there doesn't seem to be any way develop a widget and have it run on any decent fraction of the Windows computers out there. Like it or not, that's a large market.
I've recently been able to do some widget development for OS X (nothing complex, just some HTML, JS, and AJAX calls). It's a neat little environment but the error reporting left a lot to be desired.
That said, I really appreciate the ability to open Dashboard widgets in KDE. The interface isn't that magical, and except for the ability to call native code shouldn't pose much of a problem for the developers. I was wondering if they were going to do something like this and I'm glad they have.
The little widget I developed could be used by users of one of our applications. I think a fair number of them would like it. For various reasons, 30% of the users of this application are using Macs, so that doesn't pose a problem. But when I pitched the idea (with a mostly complete widget) to my superiors they weren't that interested. I was basically told "that's quite neat, but it needs to work on Windows."
Ignoring my minor "let Mac users have something first" attitude, there is a very serious problem with providing the Widget on Windows. I can't (reasonably). I researched the options and here is what I found.
That list ignores whatever GNOME uses, and the 5-10 smaller engines that very few people use. Who knows how many people use Google Desktop or Yahoo! Widgets. None of the widgets developed on these systems works with any of the other system. Even if the widget is a simple as a "Hello, world" HTML file and image(s), the markup between Dashboard and Google is quite different. From the quick look I put into it, the same thing is true with Vista and Yahoo!. Google Desktop widgets can be loaded into the Dashboard, if you have Google Desktop installed on your Mac, because it performs some kind of translation.
So I can't develop a widget. The only user base I can promise is Vista. That's a big headache and only 2/3s the side of the Mac users we know of. Asking users to go install Google Desktop or Yahoo! Widgets just to be able to view our little widget is a little tough. Making the application native would take quite a bit of time. Integration for a custom Google homepage is probably the best option for us, but still not worth it due to the inability to predict the number of people who would actually use it.
So the project (which was just a side project of mine) is basically dead. Unless they decide that providing the widget to only Mac users (I find this very unlikely), the time isn't judged to be worth it (and I don't blame them). Until Vista takes over (probably by this time next year due to MS phasing out XP sales to OEMs) there are just too many widget engines. Targeting any decent sized group of users is nearly impossible. It's a quirk of our market that Macs have the market share they do.
This kind of consolidation is a very nice thing. As a KDE user, instantly getting so many widgets available (since outside of native code and possibly running shell commands, there shouldn't be porting) is a very nice thing.
Write a short story. Write a slightly longer story. Write the story in rhyming verse. Write a non-fictional story. Write this story. Write that story. Writing assignments look boring to me. However, I saw challenges and differences in the engineering stuff I did. Maybe this guy is just ignorant of the necessary knowledge to see those differences.
Why chose a major you have to work for where you can find correct answers, when you can have one where you just have to BS enough that the teacher can't tell the difference between BS and insight? Clearly, you should just chose you major based on your possible GPA. I know they hire CEOs based on what their GPA was 30+ years ago.
Really? I had some wicked smart professors who could help with this. And I heard plenty from other students who thought this kind of thing about their non-engineering courses. I smell an anecdote.
I had encouraging professors. I had interesting professors. I also had boring professors. Why is that every Engineering professor is a stodgy old bore, while the Lit students get class after class of Dead Poet's Society teachers? Oh, that's right, they don't. Besides, maybe if you were interested in the material instead of in it for the $$$, you wouldn't have this problem. You've never seen a teacher engage some students who are interested in the subject, while called terrible by the students who didn't care about the subject? I've seen that since at least middle school.
My Literature textbooks weren't very good at all. I've seen history books that were a joke. There were almost no good textbooks. Blame the publishers, blame the teachers requiring their own text book, blame the difficulty of writing a good one. Again, Engineering shouldn't be singled out
I call blog spam on this. You notice it's just a blog entry, not a real story at Wired.
That is a diode.
It's cruddy. It's not terribly efficient. It's sensitive to the environment. But it is a diode.
I saw that. I say... wrong. The prices went up. That's economics. There are two resons.
People were pushing the players at a loss (Toshiba, et. all too, from my understanding). Now that the pressure is gone, the prices have moved from the dumping range to the "possibly sustainable" range.
I've seen people complain about the new players being more expensive than the old ones, but that always happens when the new players have more features (BD-Live and all it's costs like Ethernet, flash storage, etc) than the old ones.
They're not "leveraging a monopoly", they are just not competing at/near a loss anymore. You can't leverage a Blu-Ray monopoly, because there is no market share for it right now. DVDs will be the "monopoly" in the video market for a few years yet.
Sarcasm: Yes. That worked so well the last time. I'm sure they'll try it again with yet another incompatible format.
Development costs, testing costs, update costs (look how many updates the Blu-Ray player on the PS3 has received), shipping costs, inventory costs, shelf space costs, etc.
I always figured that MS rushed the 360 HD-DVD so that they could have something out there to help counter the Blu-Ray install base generated by the PS3. Something to give their HDi some installed base to compete with the Java on Blu-Ray.
It doesn't surprise me at all that they wouldn't make a Blu-Ray drive. Even without that point, an HD drive doesn't add to the console's value as much as it did when all players were $600+. As players get cheaper, the reason to buy the add-on over a stand along player drops.
You don't even need that. One diode and some high impedance headphones is all you need. You don't even need any kind of power. There is no amplification, but I dare you to find one other broadcast technology that can draw all the power it needs from the signal its self.
Even if we switch off of AM and FM and such to fancy digital encodings, every radio should have the ability to tune into old-fashioned AM signals built in. It's trivial to add, and functions no matter what if they need to put stations up in an emergency.
I agree it's quite unlikely. I don't think it would happen either. Still, it would be very interesting if we were to find it. Despite the rarity not really changing the outcome, how many millions of people have been convicted through fingerprints around the world? We're pretty darn sure about this, so if it were to be disproved it would be very interesting to watch.
I agree though. I believe they are unique. If they weren't, we would probably see it in identical twins. Since we don't, that means they are probably random. To find two people sharing one print would be amazing. A combination of 2 or more would almost certainly be statistically impossible.
Figures I'd find this after I posted. According to this page, AFIS (which is international) only holds 17 million prints (1.7 million people). So a US database would be over 175x as big.