I find this topic absolutely fascinating, because I personally believe that the speed kills stuff is overhyped to no end. Compare Australia to most of Europe, in Europe they have much higher speed limits than us typically, and often studies are released claiming significantly different statistics to our own. Here in Australia (dont know about the US) it seems every crash is simply put down to "speed" without any further analysis of the situation. I will accept that speed enhances the risk of fatality, but I'm very doubtful that it is simply a black and white case of: "any time you are over the limit you are at risk of painful death". 100 in a residential zone is stupid, no doubt. 150 on a flat, straight highway with easy bends is not. Both situations are treated with the same attitude. There are also studies that show higher speeds improve driver alertness, and that driver fatigue is actually a far higher cause of accidents than speeding.
Finally I'll mention a point raised in a car magazine I used to read a lot, the editor once noted, quite correctly, that there are far more obvious ways to save lives than imposing draconian speed restrictions. Firstly note that race car drivers have been walking away from high speed accidents for decades now. Lapsash seatbelts are inadequate for one, a mandatory 5-point harness would immediately reduce the death toll. We don't wear helmets while we drive, our cars are not fitted with adequate structural cabin protection and so on. If we implemented only the most realistic of the technologies used in race car driving, we would be safer than all the speed restrictions ever imposed. If everyone had to wear a helmet while driving, the death toll would be cut in half, same story for proper harnesses. Yet we rationalise these ideas away as unreasonable because they cause a nuisance to the driver. Instead we apply feel good measures which really don't do anything, then blame the youth a bit for good measure.
Try LyX. Its a GUI for Latex, you basically write out what you want in your document, and then just select styles from a menu based on the class you have chosen for your document. Its amazingly similar to how Word 2007 operates if you use the style system, but it produces far superior output, and you don't have to spend hours mucking around with styles to get your document looking good. It won't show you the final output on the screen, you have to render a pdf or something to see it, but that is good. The amount of time wasted on formatting in word is ridiculous.
The Word 2007 equation editor takes straight Tex code if you've ever bothered to try, there is almost no difference between the way Word handles math code and the way Lyx handles it in my book. I use them both frequently. I know Lyx is not Latex but Word is still very good at maths. Tex is not the be all and end all of markup either, you may personally know how to do certain things but that does not make it easy. Try Texing up some polynomial long division for example, and no, installing packages that do it for you does not count.
Don't get me wrong I'm not going to defend word, actually I've just about given up on it in favour of Lyx. But I hate the spread of FUD, no matter who its about. Word is a pain in the ass for dealing with large files, and thats a problem for publications. They recommend splitting large files up into a pile of smaller, linked files, but thats more work than it should need to be.
I'd like to see the arrogant self important types in math, science and engineering departments be parted with their beloved Tex, that will be the day hell freezes over. You have to Tex it all up by hand don't you know, and in emacs or vim no less!
Lets go back a number of decades, to a better time when actors worked on the stage. Great minds writing wonderful entertainment, unfathomably wonderful performances by the best that the field of acting could offer. All on the stage.
And then one day these "moving pictures" pop into existence. Moving pictures? The players said. Load of tripe, trashy stuff so we shall ignore it. Shortly thereafter, people seem to actually be going to see these moving pictures, and in greater numbers too! Soon the players audience is shrinking, more and more, theatres shut down or changed into 'movie theatres'.
And what does the player say? the playwright? the stage hands and producers?
"Nothing good has come of this 'moving picture' business, people just expect to be able to walk into a room and watch a pre-recorded performance! Unbelievable! These films are stealing our income! Why one small group of actors can make one single performance and duplicate such a thing until we are out of work!! Nothing good at all has come of it and nothing good will come of it!"
Ironic, to be the head of a firm that deals exclusively in what one would have once called an extremely disruptive new technology, and to make these comments... How the wheel turns.
No even pointing the finger at deregulation is too simplistic. It was an asset price bubble, funded by debt. It was just very severe this time. You know the whole feedback loop business, companies and banks invested in equity that is rising through the bubble process, so they borrow and lend more and more, causing their assets to rise (households too), causing more borrowing and lending. Throw in a glut of debt fuelled consumption for over a decade and you have the makings of the perfect storm.
Human stupidity, chaos, I dunno what you want to call it but at the end of the day it was the same thing that causes just about all recessions: Asset price bubble.
Re:I hear lots of negative criticism about Linux.
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Honestly mate, no, you got it all wrong. I knew I would get someone hairs up but seriously I am not being an asshole here. Firstly I'm not entirely clued up on the flash 64 bit stuff etc, but if you are defending it then you got me all wrong, read a bit next time ffs. My experience with it is from a year or two ago and it was disastrous, but I was not attacking linux, read my goddamn post I was saying that companies not getting their shit together is an understandable and excusable situation for linux to be in, however as one poster mentioned earlier, it is still a problem!
Dude on windows I have never had to hunt around for some obscure driver written by some random stranger that can only be installed by following a cryptic set of instructions that frequently fail. On linux, I need to do this frequently, just to get the damn machine to function correctly. I don't mind, hell I find it fun, but it is a problem from the point of view of the regular user. On windows I have never had my video drivers simply fail to work, I have never had a webcam or a sound driver simply fail to work, only very occasionally do I have some piece of software fail to work, but only due to incompatibilities with 64 bit Vista. On linux this shit occurs on every single install I have ever done. And I have to troll through forums reading dozens of posts from people with the same damn problems, but their solutions usually don't work because they have a slightly different hardware configuration. And no, linux does not have a simpler installation than the latest version of windows. Vista and Ubuntu (for example) have just about exactly the same installation process, its gui, its neat, its easy and its fast. XP loses out, yes, but seriously dude its not 2002 anymore.
On windows, this shit doesn't happen. That is my point, you can't argue that. I AM a power user on windows, and I consider myself reasonably adept at linux, but on windows I never, ever need to run the gauntlet of problem solving that I always need to on linux. I do not route around problems on windows, on windows I barely even know how to solve the sort of problems I get on linux because they just do not come up. If they have for you then as a power user for over a decade now I can say to you : you're doing it wrong.
Your attitude smacks of precisely the problem the article speaks of, you won't even admit to yourself let alone others that linux has these glaringly obvious issues, it is stupid. Just be honest for christs sake, if you want to use a computer and all of its capabilities the almost everyone expects to be able to, you are going to need a much bigger set of skills to do it on linux than you are on windows. End of story.
I love linux, but it is a tool and every tool has its place. If linux was dumbed down enough to be a viable desktop OS for regular users, I would not love it anymore, I would call it a crappy OSX clone and walk away from it, probably to something more interesting. The problems linux has are its strengths in some sense, but if what you are talking about is desktop user adoption, you need to start admitting to yourselves that these issues ARE IN FACT issues.
Re:I hear lots of negative criticism about Linux.
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Linux Needs Critics
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No the problem is, to this day, Linux on the desktop, any arbitrary desktop, has more hardware and software issues in general than windows. Its time people in the Linux camp started owning up to that and talking about how to make it better. And a disclaimer: I am a linux fan, I run two instances of linux, one is a server edition, but I also run two instances of Vista. Vista works near flawlessly, Linux server works absolutely flawlessly, linux on my eee pc, trouble, not insurmountable trouble but it is trouble (this is also what I like about it, I like tinkering with it to make it work).
The thing is, if you suggest linux to a user because its easy and 'ready' for every day use, they will without doubt run into issues, real issues here not differing ui and methodology issues, and ultimately this hurts linux acceptance and adoption. There are many reasons, valid and excusable reasons why this is the case (adobe not making a 64bit version of flash for linux, ati and nvidia generally being dumbasses about linux and opengl support in general, microsoft absolutely refusing to play ball whatsoever and so on), but these are all real reasons why linux is not ready for widespread adoption. Not because of new user interface paradigms, but because of plain old stability and the whole "just works" effect. I know you are all going to claim otherwise but this is not the case. Every time I have a linux problem I google it and find 10,000 other people with the same problem, and of course solutions, but theres a shitload of people with problems in general. With Windows this is just not the case, you have problems here and there, but nothing even remotely close to the sheer scale of issues that desktop linux is burdened with right now.
Yeah, my point is it is not inelegant intervention, it is mathematically elegant and beautiful. Fractals are so closely linked to chaotic differential systems which define our experience in classical terms that it would be silly to dismiss them as simple trickery. Go look at how the Mandelbrot coincides with the bifurcation plot of the logistic sequence, now that is amazing stuff.
Honestly the idea that fractal geometry plays a part in QM is insightful, and quite elegant if you ask me. After all so far as I can see, we do keep finding new turtles down there. Given the history of science, the likelihood that we are wrong about current theories is pretty damn high, like 99.9% its wrong to think we've reached the answers.
You fail at math, catastrophically. Its not some sort of control statement, it is one of the fundamental concepts in logic: if (statement is true) then (other statement is also true). Its not about control its about a logically consistent argument.
Math is not some natural mystical force that we use to show us the enlightenments of the laws of physics, its a bunch of rules that we define, and the results of these rules. Physics is no different.
You have made the fatal error that many romantic physicists make about their mathematics: Mathematics, as used by physicists describes observations, it does not define reality. Even better, mathematics as understood by mathematicians is a logically consistent set of theorems derived from a base set of axioms, the whole point of using axioms is that an axiom is simply the point where you throw up your hands and say: this is just given, a rule, it is how it is because we say so and it makes sense to us, nothing more.
Geez guys who would have thought a bunch of nerds would be so bad at this. Looping != inelegant intervention or whatever you called it. The mandelbrot set is simply recursively defined.
ie: f1(z)=C restricted to the domain 0 less than C less than 2 in complex (goddamn/. dont like the html or symbols) then fn=fn-1^2+C or fn=fn-1^2+f1 if you like, for all n greater than 1. ie: f = f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(...)))))))))))) tending to infinity. Then the set is defined in the exact same way you define any set: M={C in Complex such that fn is bounded} (Incidentally, does slashdot do latex? cos this stuff is hard to write out in ascii)
A recursively defined function is no different (in principle) to a recursively defined sequence, or a recursively defined differential equation which are all normal, fundamental concepts in mathematics. Not inelegant and tricky.
Like it or not, ALL analysis (read: advanced calculus) involves basically the same notions of abstracted set theory, I mean sure its obvious to you that continuity, curvature etc can be defined by derivatives which are defined by limits right? Well define limit, and no "zoom in and the line gets straighter" does not count. And then what on earth does limit mean? I mean when is it useful or even valid? How do you abstract that idea to general scenarios? What you find is that just about all of maths is defined within the confines of: {Some bunch of numbers, such that all of the numbers satisfy some property}
In short: fractals count, now hand in your nerd badges!
The thing about Python is that you are replacing every lost hour in coding time with an hour of debugging time.
...If you suck at Python.
Its not the same as other languages, so you keep things like automatic type handling in mind, and force types to be certain things where necessary. Its pretty fucking simple if you're not stupid. The fact is that Python is being widely adopted, rapidly, and for this exact reason: Speed is not the issue anymore, volume of output is far more important. Coders cost more than faster computers.
I'm sure you can, but I can guarantee you that you will need to type dramatically less code in Python, and thus output is greatly increased no matter how fast you are. This is like saying you can pump out a 5000 word essay in the time it takes someone to do up a 100 word paragraph.
The thing about Python is you are replacing every lost hour in runtime with a day gained in development time. That is the point of Python. Numpy (formerly scipy I think) is mostly written in C anyway and provides fast n-dimensional array objects for vector and matrix operations, there are really only a few bottlenecks for maths/science purposes. Generally anything that is going to take a seriously long amount of time you would be doing in C over anything else anyway, what Python is is a viable alternative to Matlab etc, and a damn sight less expensive!
Where I study Engineering they teach Python for this very reason. It has a gentle syntax which appeals to engineers and scientists who often aren't bargaining to become coders, and it is so much cheaper than Matlab that any missing features are rendered a moot point.
Seriously, sitting on the sidelines and saying "I'm not gonna use Python because it is slow" is silly, it is so damn easy to code in python that you would learn it in a weekend if you already have coding experience. And as I said before, any lost time running python scripts over other languages is made up ten time over at least in the ridiculously short development times that go with Python scripts. Yes, it really is THAT easy to do anything in Python, there is a reason people bug you to try it out. Just give it a weekend, Python deserves it!
At $700 cheaper from the outset as you just explained in your own post, I think you've answered your own question. The clues are all in there, young fanboy, search your soul for the answers.
No, in Apple's case leverage is the correct term, since through the reality distortion field they are capable of actually gaining more results than their inputs would imply. So yes, by using a fancy word like Nehalem Architecture, they leverage their marketing position.
Kind of similar to how sub prime securitisation worked if you ask me.
Dude whales aren't internal combustion engines! Yes the whales etc exhale CO2, but they are also carbon based lifeforms so clearly something has been held onto.
If you increase the total biomass of the earth, CO2 has no option but to decrease, or else where is all that carbon coming from? Are animals and plants eating coal and oil now? The experiment may not have worked as planned but it has shown that you can boost the ocean biomass simply by seeding it with iron, thats damn interesting if you ask me. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees, this is a good example of one of my big complaints about climate change obsession: There are still other environmental issues out there, and we just discovered something very interesting relating to one of them.
But listen to yourself, you are prescribing even greater limitations on how the user should interact with the computer, based solely on what you personally like. Try to think outside your own little idea of right and wrong for a moment and think of the bigger picture. I guess my point is: you are already a minority in the way you interact with the system, now don't go shoving your point of view down everyone else's throat just to be a crank and say: "I do it different so its bad".
I like it, I like using search, and I like having context groupings in my control panel. You may know exactly where everything is but every time I jump on a computer with goddamn classic view in the control panel I spend at least 60 seconds just trying to find something like 'mouse'. On XP it is doubly bad because I can't get my insta-search. I guarantee you that the way I use Vista, actually working with the UI features makes me faster at doing administrative tasks, or any other day to day task for that matter, than most people like you who insist things were perfected back in '95. I can guarantee that OSX users are in the same boat, for the same reasons. Manually searching through piles of unsorted data is not efficient, it only becomes efficient when, as you describe, you "know" where everything "is", but that leads to severe upset any time something is remotely different.
Me I like to live my life a little more free and open, you know, accept things as they are, not how they "should be". (tongue is in cheek in case you missed it)
"Why should I learn something new if it doesn't offer me any benefits?"
Beautiful philosophy there, really that going to just keep your life in an interesting place all the time now isn't it? Seriously dude this is the dumbest thing I've heard all day, all week even. Its not like you are taking a course in abstract algebra, you are 'learning' how to move your mouse over to a search box and type the name of the application or control panel item you are after. If you can learn linux then you can learn how to use windows without being a total dumbass about it. Honestly.
You are talking about your personal preferences and setup. Not everybody has a massive dual monitor setup, laptops are a perfect example of where this is not even plausible. So you don't typically have enough screen real estate to make your vertical taskbar wide enough to see a sufficient amount of information. Thus you are back to square one, the scenario I describe. I don't care what you like, I'm telling you in my experience it has been a fantastic feature that I have yet to see implemented in any other OS. I've shown it to heaps of people who also think it is a great feature.
I'm pretty sure you'll be getting speed, stability and security with win7 anyway, just about any information out there about it thus far confirms this. But if you are one of those people who is going to just switch it back to classic mode then you are a lost cause anyway. You lot constantly griping about changes to your user interface, while at the same time complaining that windows UI is hopeless (how do you improve without changing things I ask?). You are the computer equivalent of a Volvo driver, or a Toyota driver, who cares what it looks like they say! Aesthetics are superfluous crap, all that matters is functionality, and so on. Truth is the sex sells, just go look at any mac out there.
Don't like it? Don't buy it, but don't kid yourself into thinking it is all pointless just because you disagree with it.
Just about every single one of your complaints about Vista here are rendered moot with one word: search. Search you dimwit! Everything I do in Vista is one or two clicks and a search term. In XP it is 5-10 clicks to do the same thing. Vista has its problems, lots of stuff annoys the shit out of me but seriously dude, these are some of the stupidest complaints around. +5 insightful my ass.
This is the thing I don't understand, but then this is slashdot so I probably shouldn't bother. You lot of grumpy old dudes just refuse to let anything change. WHAT? change that way I use the computer?? Get off my lawn son!! So what is it to be? in 20 years time sticking with your guns never letting go of that XP install? On your old P4? Why should you upgrade after all.
Roll with it, learn how to use the new OS before bitching about it or go back to the rocking chair!
Superbar is awesome for one, but I'll give you one solid feature that will without a doubt improve productivity for me. Lets say you have a stack of windows open, as I do constantly, but lets say windows has grouped and stacked certain programs, as it does, in XP and Vista you go up through your little stack but don't always work out immediately which is the one you want. In 7 however in stead of a stack it gives you a stack of window previews, but if you hover over one it makes all other windows bar that one transparent so you can see exactly what it is you are opening. Its brilliant, and will save me loads of time and effort in alt-tabbing.
That and indexed search across the OS, seriously I don't understand how anybody can live without this feature in this day and age.
Absolute absence of flying around cables, top of the line electronic components, maximum care down to the very little details.
Points 1 and 3 I'll give you, but as a tinkering geek I prefer my system sitting under my desk with the side off and cables and disks hanging around everywhere. But that is a personal thing and I'm completely ok with people wanting the clean stuff.
But I take serious issue with point 2. How, exactly do you know that your mac is full of top of the line electronic components? Are you an electrical engineer? And if you are, do you have x-ray micro vision that can peer down into the layers of plastic and fibreglass and absolutely confirm superior quality over apples competitors? You see the thing is, I claim, yes thats right, I make the conjecture that Apple use the same damn components that everybody else uses, and they pick them based on cost over quality just like everybody else. Yes they might use DDR3, yes they might use fast processors (from my observations however they do not), but I swear to you that it is the same stuff that comes with the beige boxes from Dell, IBM, HP et al.
THIS is what bugs me about Apple fans, the instant assumption that a fantastic quality exterior implies a top quality interior. And its precisely what Apple wants you to think. So in summary, while you may not be paying extra for only that logo, you most certainly are paying extra for a nice case, and that is all.
PS. Yes yes I know, OSX blah blah blah, personally I dont like it and its been shown by the black hats to have inferior security (this is irrefutably true and outlined here and by the recent two years of Pwn2own contests), and as yet does not support 64bit. Its shiny yes so shiny... like the case it comes in.
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I find this topic absolutely fascinating, because I personally believe that the speed kills stuff is overhyped to no end. Compare Australia to most of Europe, in Europe they have much higher speed limits than us typically, and often studies are released claiming significantly different statistics to our own. Here in Australia (dont know about the US) it seems every crash is simply put down to "speed" without any further analysis of the situation. I will accept that speed enhances the risk of fatality, but I'm very doubtful that it is simply a black and white case of: "any time you are over the limit you are at risk of painful death". 100 in a residential zone is stupid, no doubt. 150 on a flat, straight highway with easy bends is not. Both situations are treated with the same attitude. There are also studies that show higher speeds improve driver alertness, and that driver fatigue is actually a far higher cause of accidents than speeding.
Finally I'll mention a point raised in a car magazine I used to read a lot, the editor once noted, quite correctly, that there are far more obvious ways to save lives than imposing draconian speed restrictions. Firstly note that race car drivers have been walking away from high speed accidents for decades now. Lapsash seatbelts are inadequate for one, a mandatory 5-point harness would immediately reduce the death toll. We don't wear helmets while we drive, our cars are not fitted with adequate structural cabin protection and so on. If we implemented only the most realistic of the technologies used in race car driving, we would be safer than all the speed restrictions ever imposed. If everyone had to wear a helmet while driving, the death toll would be cut in half, same story for proper harnesses. Yet we rationalise these ideas away as unreasonable because they cause a nuisance to the driver. Instead we apply feel good measures which really don't do anything, then blame the youth a bit for good measure.
Try LyX. Its a GUI for Latex, you basically write out what you want in your document, and then just select styles from a menu based on the class you have chosen for your document. Its amazingly similar to how Word 2007 operates if you use the style system, but it produces far superior output, and you don't have to spend hours mucking around with styles to get your document looking good. It won't show you the final output on the screen, you have to render a pdf or something to see it, but that is good. The amount of time wasted on formatting in word is ridiculous.
Saving your word document as RTF will destroy most of its formatting in the first place.
The Word 2007 equation editor takes straight Tex code if you've ever bothered to try, there is almost no difference between the way Word handles math code and the way Lyx handles it in my book. I use them both frequently. I know Lyx is not Latex but Word is still very good at maths. Tex is not the be all and end all of markup either, you may personally know how to do certain things but that does not make it easy. Try Texing up some polynomial long division for example, and no, installing packages that do it for you does not count.
Don't get me wrong I'm not going to defend word, actually I've just about given up on it in favour of Lyx. But I hate the spread of FUD, no matter who its about. Word is a pain in the ass for dealing with large files, and thats a problem for publications. They recommend splitting large files up into a pile of smaller, linked files, but thats more work than it should need to be.
I'd like to see the arrogant self important types in math, science and engineering departments be parted with their beloved Tex, that will be the day hell freezes over. You have to Tex it all up by hand don't you know, and in emacs or vim no less!
Lets go back a number of decades, to a better time when actors worked on the stage. Great minds writing wonderful entertainment, unfathomably wonderful performances by the best that the field of acting could offer. All on the stage.
And then one day these "moving pictures" pop into existence. Moving pictures? The players said. Load of tripe, trashy stuff so we shall ignore it. Shortly thereafter, people seem to actually be going to see these moving pictures, and in greater numbers too! Soon the players audience is shrinking, more and more, theatres shut down or changed into 'movie theatres'.
And what does the player say? the playwright? the stage hands and producers?
"Nothing good has come of this 'moving picture' business, people just expect to be able to walk into a room and watch a pre-recorded performance! Unbelievable! These films are stealing our income! Why one small group of actors can make one single performance and duplicate such a thing until we are out of work!! Nothing good at all has come of it and nothing good will come of it!"
Ironic, to be the head of a firm that deals exclusively in what one would have once called an extremely disruptive new technology, and to make these comments... How the wheel turns.
You Fail!
Also, closing the tab does not stop the download, it just closes the tab. The download continues in the download manager.
Thats double fail.
No even pointing the finger at deregulation is too simplistic. It was an asset price bubble, funded by debt. It was just very severe this time. You know the whole feedback loop business, companies and banks invested in equity that is rising through the bubble process, so they borrow and lend more and more, causing their assets to rise (households too), causing more borrowing and lending. Throw in a glut of debt fuelled consumption for over a decade and you have the makings of the perfect storm.
Human stupidity, chaos, I dunno what you want to call it but at the end of the day it was the same thing that causes just about all recessions: Asset price bubble.
Honestly mate, no, you got it all wrong. I knew I would get someone hairs up but seriously I am not being an asshole here. Firstly I'm not entirely clued up on the flash 64 bit stuff etc, but if you are defending it then you got me all wrong, read a bit next time ffs. My experience with it is from a year or two ago and it was disastrous, but I was not attacking linux, read my goddamn post I was saying that companies not getting their shit together is an understandable and excusable situation for linux to be in, however as one poster mentioned earlier, it is still a problem!
Dude on windows I have never had to hunt around for some obscure driver written by some random stranger that can only be installed by following a cryptic set of instructions that frequently fail. On linux, I need to do this frequently, just to get the damn machine to function correctly. I don't mind, hell I find it fun, but it is a problem from the point of view of the regular user. On windows I have never had my video drivers simply fail to work, I have never had a webcam or a sound driver simply fail to work, only very occasionally do I have some piece of software fail to work, but only due to incompatibilities with 64 bit Vista. On linux this shit occurs on every single install I have ever done. And I have to troll through forums reading dozens of posts from people with the same damn problems, but their solutions usually don't work because they have a slightly different hardware configuration. And no, linux does not have a simpler installation than the latest version of windows. Vista and Ubuntu (for example) have just about exactly the same installation process, its gui, its neat, its easy and its fast. XP loses out, yes, but seriously dude its not 2002 anymore.
On windows, this shit doesn't happen. That is my point, you can't argue that. I AM a power user on windows, and I consider myself reasonably adept at linux, but on windows I never, ever need to run the gauntlet of problem solving that I always need to on linux. I do not route around problems on windows, on windows I barely even know how to solve the sort of problems I get on linux because they just do not come up. If they have for you then as a power user for over a decade now I can say to you : you're doing it wrong.
Your attitude smacks of precisely the problem the article speaks of, you won't even admit to yourself let alone others that linux has these glaringly obvious issues, it is stupid. Just be honest for christs sake, if you want to use a computer and all of its capabilities the almost everyone expects to be able to, you are going to need a much bigger set of skills to do it on linux than you are on windows. End of story.
I love linux, but it is a tool and every tool has its place. If linux was dumbed down enough to be a viable desktop OS for regular users, I would not love it anymore, I would call it a crappy OSX clone and walk away from it, probably to something more interesting. The problems linux has are its strengths in some sense, but if what you are talking about is desktop user adoption, you need to start admitting to yourselves that these issues ARE IN FACT issues.
No the problem is, to this day, Linux on the desktop, any arbitrary desktop, has more hardware and software issues in general than windows. Its time people in the Linux camp started owning up to that and talking about how to make it better. And a disclaimer: I am a linux fan, I run two instances of linux, one is a server edition, but I also run two instances of Vista. Vista works near flawlessly, Linux server works absolutely flawlessly, linux on my eee pc, trouble, not insurmountable trouble but it is trouble (this is also what I like about it, I like tinkering with it to make it work).
The thing is, if you suggest linux to a user because its easy and 'ready' for every day use, they will without doubt run into issues, real issues here not differing ui and methodology issues, and ultimately this hurts linux acceptance and adoption. There are many reasons, valid and excusable reasons why this is the case (adobe not making a 64bit version of flash for linux, ati and nvidia generally being dumbasses about linux and opengl support in general, microsoft absolutely refusing to play ball whatsoever and so on), but these are all real reasons why linux is not ready for widespread adoption. Not because of new user interface paradigms, but because of plain old stability and the whole "just works" effect. I know you are all going to claim otherwise but this is not the case. Every time I have a linux problem I google it and find 10,000 other people with the same problem, and of course solutions, but theres a shitload of people with problems in general. With Windows this is just not the case, you have problems here and there, but nothing even remotely close to the sheer scale of issues that desktop linux is burdened with right now.
Yeah, my point is it is not inelegant intervention, it is mathematically elegant and beautiful. Fractals are so closely linked to chaotic differential systems which define our experience in classical terms that it would be silly to dismiss them as simple trickery. Go look at how the Mandelbrot coincides with the bifurcation plot of the logistic sequence, now that is amazing stuff.
Honestly the idea that fractal geometry plays a part in QM is insightful, and quite elegant if you ask me. After all so far as I can see, we do keep finding new turtles down there. Given the history of science, the likelihood that we are wrong about current theories is pretty damn high, like 99.9% its wrong to think we've reached the answers.
You fail at math, catastrophically. Its not some sort of control statement, it is one of the fundamental concepts in logic: if (statement is true) then (other statement is also true). Its not about control its about a logically consistent argument.
Math is not some natural mystical force that we use to show us the enlightenments of the laws of physics, its a bunch of rules that we define, and the results of these rules. Physics is no different.
You have made the fatal error that many romantic physicists make about their mathematics: Mathematics, as used by physicists describes observations, it does not define reality. Even better, mathematics as understood by mathematicians is a logically consistent set of theorems derived from a base set of axioms, the whole point of using axioms is that an axiom is simply the point where you throw up your hands and say: this is just given, a rule, it is how it is because we say so and it makes sense to us, nothing more.
Geez guys who would have thought a bunch of nerds would be so bad at this. Looping != inelegant intervention or whatever you called it. The mandelbrot set is simply recursively defined.
ie: /. dont like the html or symbols)
f1(z)=C restricted to the domain 0 less than C less than 2 in complex (goddamn
then fn=fn-1^2+C or fn=fn-1^2+f1 if you like, for all n greater than 1.
ie:
f = f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(f(...)))))))))))) tending to infinity.
Then the set is defined in the exact same way you define any set:
M={C in Complex such that fn is bounded}
(Incidentally, does slashdot do latex? cos this stuff is hard to write out in ascii)
A recursively defined function is no different (in principle) to a recursively defined sequence, or a recursively defined differential equation which are all normal, fundamental concepts in mathematics. Not inelegant and tricky.
Like it or not, ALL analysis (read: advanced calculus) involves basically the same notions of abstracted set theory, I mean sure its obvious to you that continuity, curvature etc can be defined by derivatives which are defined by limits right? Well define limit, and no "zoom in and the line gets straighter" does not count. And then what on earth does limit mean? I mean when is it useful or even valid? How do you abstract that idea to general scenarios? What you find is that just about all of maths is defined within the confines of: {Some bunch of numbers, such that all of the numbers satisfy some property}
In short: fractals count, now hand in your nerd badges!
Its not the same as other languages, so you keep things like automatic type handling in mind, and force types to be certain things where necessary. Its pretty fucking simple if you're not stupid. The fact is that Python is being widely adopted, rapidly, and for this exact reason: Speed is not the issue anymore, volume of output is far more important. Coders cost more than faster computers.
I'm sure you can, but I can guarantee you that you will need to type dramatically less code in Python, and thus output is greatly increased no matter how fast you are. This is like saying you can pump out a 5000 word essay in the time it takes someone to do up a 100 word paragraph.
The thing about Python is you are replacing every lost hour in runtime with a day gained in development time. That is the point of Python. Numpy (formerly scipy I think) is mostly written in C anyway and provides fast n-dimensional array objects for vector and matrix operations, there are really only a few bottlenecks for maths/science purposes. Generally anything that is going to take a seriously long amount of time you would be doing in C over anything else anyway, what Python is is a viable alternative to Matlab etc, and a damn sight less expensive!
Where I study Engineering they teach Python for this very reason. It has a gentle syntax which appeals to engineers and scientists who often aren't bargaining to become coders, and it is so much cheaper than Matlab that any missing features are rendered a moot point.
Seriously, sitting on the sidelines and saying "I'm not gonna use Python because it is slow" is silly, it is so damn easy to code in python that you would learn it in a weekend if you already have coding experience. And as I said before, any lost time running python scripts over other languages is made up ten time over at least in the ridiculously short development times that go with Python scripts. Yes, it really is THAT easy to do anything in Python, there is a reason people bug you to try it out. Just give it a weekend, Python deserves it!
At $700 cheaper from the outset as you just explained in your own post, I think you've answered your own question. The clues are all in there, young fanboy, search your soul for the answers.
No, in Apple's case leverage is the correct term, since through the reality distortion field they are capable of actually gaining more results than their inputs would imply. So yes, by using a fancy word like Nehalem Architecture, they leverage their marketing position.
Kind of similar to how sub prime securitisation worked if you ask me.
Dude whales aren't internal combustion engines! Yes the whales etc exhale CO2, but they are also carbon based lifeforms so clearly something has been held onto.
If you increase the total biomass of the earth, CO2 has no option but to decrease, or else where is all that carbon coming from? Are animals and plants eating coal and oil now? The experiment may not have worked as planned but it has shown that you can boost the ocean biomass simply by seeding it with iron, thats damn interesting if you ask me. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees, this is a good example of one of my big complaints about climate change obsession: There are still other environmental issues out there, and we just discovered something very interesting relating to one of them.
But listen to yourself, you are prescribing even greater limitations on how the user should interact with the computer, based solely on what you personally like. Try to think outside your own little idea of right and wrong for a moment and think of the bigger picture. I guess my point is: you are already a minority in the way you interact with the system, now don't go shoving your point of view down everyone else's throat just to be a crank and say: "I do it different so its bad".
I like it, I like using search, and I like having context groupings in my control panel. You may know exactly where everything is but every time I jump on a computer with goddamn classic view in the control panel I spend at least 60 seconds just trying to find something like 'mouse'. On XP it is doubly bad because I can't get my insta-search. I guarantee you that the way I use Vista, actually working with the UI features makes me faster at doing administrative tasks, or any other day to day task for that matter, than most people like you who insist things were perfected back in '95. I can guarantee that OSX users are in the same boat, for the same reasons. Manually searching through piles of unsorted data is not efficient, it only becomes efficient when, as you describe, you "know" where everything "is", but that leads to severe upset any time something is remotely different.
Me I like to live my life a little more free and open, you know, accept things as they are, not how they "should be". (tongue is in cheek in case you missed it)
"Why should I learn something new if it doesn't offer me any benefits?"
Beautiful philosophy there, really that going to just keep your life in an interesting place all the time now isn't it? Seriously dude this is the dumbest thing I've heard all day, all week even. Its not like you are taking a course in abstract algebra, you are 'learning' how to move your mouse over to a search box and type the name of the application or control panel item you are after. If you can learn linux then you can learn how to use windows without being a total dumbass about it. Honestly.
You are talking about your personal preferences and setup. Not everybody has a massive dual monitor setup, laptops are a perfect example of where this is not even plausible. So you don't typically have enough screen real estate to make your vertical taskbar wide enough to see a sufficient amount of information. Thus you are back to square one, the scenario I describe. I don't care what you like, I'm telling you in my experience it has been a fantastic feature that I have yet to see implemented in any other OS. I've shown it to heaps of people who also think it is a great feature.
I'm pretty sure you'll be getting speed, stability and security with win7 anyway, just about any information out there about it thus far confirms this. But if you are one of those people who is going to just switch it back to classic mode then you are a lost cause anyway. You lot constantly griping about changes to your user interface, while at the same time complaining that windows UI is hopeless (how do you improve without changing things I ask?). You are the computer equivalent of a Volvo driver, or a Toyota driver, who cares what it looks like they say! Aesthetics are superfluous crap, all that matters is functionality, and so on. Truth is the sex sells, just go look at any mac out there.
Don't like it? Don't buy it, but don't kid yourself into thinking it is all pointless just because you disagree with it.
Just about every single one of your complaints about Vista here are rendered moot with one word: search. Search you dimwit! Everything I do in Vista is one or two clicks and a search term. In XP it is 5-10 clicks to do the same thing. Vista has its problems, lots of stuff annoys the shit out of me but seriously dude, these are some of the stupidest complaints around. +5 insightful my ass.
This is the thing I don't understand, but then this is slashdot so I probably shouldn't bother. You lot of grumpy old dudes just refuse to let anything change. WHAT? change that way I use the computer?? Get off my lawn son!! So what is it to be? in 20 years time sticking with your guns never letting go of that XP install? On your old P4? Why should you upgrade after all.
Roll with it, learn how to use the new OS before bitching about it or go back to the rocking chair!
Turn on windows classic view, you can be happily stuck in 1995 forever!
Superbar is awesome for one, but I'll give you one solid feature that will without a doubt improve productivity for me. Lets say you have a stack of windows open, as I do constantly, but lets say windows has grouped and stacked certain programs, as it does, in XP and Vista you go up through your little stack but don't always work out immediately which is the one you want. In 7 however in stead of a stack it gives you a stack of window previews, but if you hover over one it makes all other windows bar that one transparent so you can see exactly what it is you are opening. Its brilliant, and will save me loads of time and effort in alt-tabbing.
That and indexed search across the OS, seriously I don't understand how anybody can live without this feature in this day and age.
Points 1 and 3 I'll give you, but as a tinkering geek I prefer my system sitting under my desk with the side off and cables and disks hanging around everywhere. But that is a personal thing and I'm completely ok with people wanting the clean stuff.
But I take serious issue with point 2. How, exactly do you know that your mac is full of top of the line electronic components? Are you an electrical engineer? And if you are, do you have x-ray micro vision that can peer down into the layers of plastic and fibreglass and absolutely confirm superior quality over apples competitors? You see the thing is, I claim, yes thats right, I make the conjecture that Apple use the same damn components that everybody else uses, and they pick them based on cost over quality just like everybody else. Yes they might use DDR3, yes they might use fast processors (from my observations however they do not), but I swear to you that it is the same stuff that comes with the beige boxes from Dell, IBM, HP et al.
THIS is what bugs me about Apple fans, the instant assumption that a fantastic quality exterior implies a top quality interior. And its precisely what Apple wants you to think. So in summary, while you may not be paying extra for only that logo, you most certainly are paying extra for a nice case, and that is all.
PS. Yes yes I know, OSX blah blah blah, personally I dont like it and its been shown by the black hats to have inferior security (this is irrefutably true and outlined here and by the recent two years of Pwn2own contests), and as yet does not support 64bit. Its shiny yes so shiny... like the case it comes in.