I would argue that the United States has become a semi-First World country. We have lost our manufacturing base, our strong middle class is rapidly diminishing and the gap between the poor and rich is widening.
Quick! Time to socialize more of the economy and raise taxes! </irony>
Before you buy a Das Keyboard for a Mac Mini, you should really check out the switch-based keyboard I use with my Mac Mini. I use the SMK-88. http://www.notestation.com/smk-88.htm
The keyboard is small, but the keys are full-sized. It has no numeric keypad, but it does have F-keys. The eject-disc keys and the volume keys work fine with the Mac. And again, the wonderful switch-based keys provide excellent tactile and auditory feedback while typing. There is no USB hub, but you do get a USB-2 pass-thru.
Also at around $85, you'll save some cash relative to the price of a new Das Keyboard.
Add to that the fact that IBM didn't mind hobbling their microcomputer with the x86 architecture. It was in their best interest at that time because they were still making lots of money on minicomputers and mainframes. A clean microcomputer architecture that was both efficient and easy-to-extend would only grow faster and eat their main business-sales that much quicker.
In any event, they lost control of the PC platform when the clones entered the market. And ironically, cloning is what helped pump enough money into the market to encourage Intel to patch up the x86's deficiencies.
If the paragraph size had been 256 bytes, that would have resulted in a 24MB address space. We probably wouldn't have hit the wall for another several years. Companies such as VisiCorp might have succeeded at products like VisiOn, which were bending heaven and earth to cram their products into 640K, it would have been much easier to do graphics-oriented processing (death of Microsoft and Apple, anyone?).
This is one of the primary reasons Apple passed up x86 to go with Motorola's 68000-series processors. They had enough foresight to keep that 640K limit from applying to them. Additionally, there was no "real" or "extended" chunks of memory to twiddle.
Good information, Jonadab! I recognized your nick from the Emacs color-theme package. Thanks for the fine work you did on your color-themes. I particularly like "Gnome," and "Jonadabian Slate." Keep up the good work!
My recommendation for anyone getting into programming is to watch the SICP videos. If you're completely new to programming, this subject matter may be a little deep. But if you are anxious to get past the scripting level of programming and into the methods for organising, planning, and thinking about programming, there is no better introduction.
They may not have a high market share in the windows browser market, but they have a near monopoly in the MP3 player and online music store market. Here it appears they are leveraging the monopolies they do have to force their way into the windows browser market by using the anti-competitive practice known as product tying.
Two points:
If Microsoft's dominance of the OS market precludes them from selling the Windows OS and "product-tying" Internet Explorer, then why do they still bundle Internet Explorer?
Strictly speaking, Apple's offering a free Safari download through iTunes, itself a free download, cannot be "product-tying."
If you look up this bill at the Library of Congress, you'll find that it makes reference to a specific mechanism or process known as "Serial Copy Management." If these devices had no such management, and I doubt they did (or do for that matter), then every MP3-player known to geek is against the law.
I have a seven-year-old child who needs to drive around town in a car, but has problems getting the keys. Is there anyone on Slashdot who has suggestions on how to open, start, and operate a car without keys and otherwise make it so easy even a seven-year-old can do it?
Thanks!
Signed,
A Responsible Human Being
You know why? Cuz right now I can pick up the phone and get a functional drive and disks that can hold 1.6TB each with a shelf life of like forever. And of course speeds of 120 MB/s reading. This 18 months stuff isn't going to cut it.
This article on inPhase from a few months back says "InPhase plans a second-generation 800GB optical disc with data transfer rates of about 80MB/sec., with plans to expand its capacity to 1.6TB by 2010." (emphasis mine) So unless by "today," you mean "3 years from today," then yeah, you can get some sweet 1.6TB storage.
And you might want to check your credit balance before you whip out your credit card for one: "At US$18,000 for a holographic disk drive, InPhase has priced its product roughly mid-point between a $30,000 enterprise-class tape drive and midrange tape drives such as LTO tape drives, which go for around $4,000. The holographic platters will retail for $180 each." Of course, this is the amount they are charging for the 300GB version that was supposed to start shipping back in July. But you should be able to get this today -- if not "today."
Hmm. Out of curiosity, on what basis are you determining that such a slant would be incorrect? Obviously, you're right that confirmation bias would lead to that slant, but that doesn't say anything about whether it's correct--nor would your own biases to view such a slant as zealotry.
Where is your own opinion here coming from? Do you have the knowledge & understanding of the facts of the situation to know that such a slant would be wrong? Or does it just fit your own nice package of preconceived notions?
I think the only two pertinent questions regarding a scientific paper are these: why retract it if you can refute it? & If you can't refute it, why are you retracting it?
The guy that wrote this article should consider working for the Onion. It's hilarious that he can't seem to figure out how to shut down the computer. I mean, it's the first freaking button next to the search box, and it doesn't even ask for confirmation anymore. I leave the thing on all the time so I'm not big on the shutdown shortcuts, but whatever.
Your mentioning this reminded me of the articles Jerry Pournelle used to write for Byte magazine. You could always count on Jerry to pen a long screed on the fallout from the newest upgrade to Windows. It was hilarious because of his 2 or 3 computers and various peripherals, one or two would invariably end up with some major malfunction. From that point on, the article became a Legendary Win-Hell Tale of Woe that often ended in Mr. Pournelle getting help directly from the President/CEO of one of the tech companies associated with the failing subsystems, drivers, or parts. Even then a happy ending was no guarantee. Byte magazine was no Apple or Linux fan-mag, but Pournelle's column read like Apple-fanboi Windows satire of the highest calibre.
I don't own a Mac and have only touched OSX a few times on friends machines (and at school) but I find the fact that applications never seem to really be able to maximize and there are huge amounts of wasted screen space.
In Classic Mac OS, clicking the maximize button made the window just big enough to fit the content of the window, no bigger. Option + maximize-button was the command to maximize a window to completely fill the screen. In OSX it's essentially the same, but it seems more apps follow their own standards.
Why is it that women aren't interested in being in IT? (Male hostility is clearly a factor as every slashdot thread on sexism proves).
Ahem. Even a socially-malajusted nerd realizes his chance for a date go through the roof when more women join his field. You need to come up with a more plausible whine.
Of course, it would seem to me that they're making a mistake. High margins in most companies implies a very efficient operation relative to competitors because most firms don't have much price control. Apple's cachet, however, allows them considerable price control, and cachet is a fairly ephemeral asset, no matter how effective Apple has been in recent years in building it.
Apple has always had this cachet. They have always been effective at staying out of the commodity side of a market primarily due to their vision and ability to innovate (two more examples of "fairly ephemeral assets"). In the computer market, these skills have kept Apple alive and kicking for over 30 years. OS2, Commodore, DR-DOS, and a variety of used-to-be-very-big-name PC & software makers have come and gone since then. And Apple did this largely by going against the "conventional wisdom" spouted by almost every P.C. tech pundit whose job depended on Microsoft/Intel/AMD advertising dollars (i.e. most of them). In the wider non-PC markets, these skills will allow Apple to innovate and thrive and to ultimately become the conventional wisdom of those markets.
I hope we can reduce the practice of religion, just like we can reduce alcohol, drug addiction, HIV, spousal abuse, and illegitimacy, and I hope that, at the same time, we can remain tolerant of the people suffering from those afflictions.
In religious terms, this is known as "hate the sin, love the sinner." Or in more contemporay, urban terms as "hate the game, not the player."
You know, religion is one of the key institutions outside of jail and "public education" that encourage people to reduce alcohol, drug addiction, HIV, spousal abuse, and illegitimacy. It seems to me you need all the help you can get in the "War on Error." So does it really make sense to undermine any ally in a situation like this? Is the school/jail solution really performing so well, that we can do without our single most important tradition for encouraging of hope, self-reliance, and mutual respect?
Before we subsidize the science/engineering market for Big Business, why don't we remove the previous subsidy, the H1B visas? Otherwise we are just following the usual government template, which is to interfere in a market, and then try to fix the fallout from that interference (H1B to keep supply costs down) by interfering in the market some more (free degrees to Americans to compete against the low-cost H1B). Nah. This makes too much sense and cuts out the government middle-man. Congress will never go for that.
Ironically enough, the one instance I can think of is Apple.
There's very little irony that a company like Apple, which continues to be 1-5 years ahead of Microsoft on most fronts, continues to thrive in spite of the me-too, Milli-Vanilli, corporate giant always breathing down its neck.
MS's $500 million investment probably saved the company from bankruptcy.
You must have used one of those old Pentium processors with the FDIV bug to help you write this statement, because somehow it computed $150 million as $500 million. And your accuracy only went down from there, because Apple was nowhere near bankruptcy at the time. It had a cool billion in cash reserves.
This was at the low point of Apple's market share, reputation and stock price.
True, true, true. But it was arguably also the upswing of all those things as Steve Jobs had recently rejoined the company and had brought with him Apple's next operating system from NeXT.
MS propped them up because they knew Apple customers were potential MS customers too, even if they didn't use their OS.
Not even close to the truth. This deal was not Microsoft propping anyone up out of the goodness of their heart. It was strictly a quid pro quo situation. But you already knew that, as evidenced by this last slipshod incomplete list of factoids:
The deal also called for a new release of Office on Mac, which ended up being superior to the Windows version and no doubt made the Mac a more acceptable Windows alternative for some people. In exchange, all Apple had to do was make IE the default browser on Macs... something that's now long fallen by the wayside.
Mostly correct, but woefully incomplete. Microsoft got:
$150 million in non-voting Apple stock that had nowhere to go but UP. Note: if they still ahve this stock right now, it's worth billions!
The end of numerous expensive old court cases brought against Microsoft by Apple Computer.
IE installed as the default on Mac desktops (I had almost forgotten this one).
Microsoft PR stunt to show the DOJ that they weren't actively destroying all competition.
In return for what they gave Microsoft, Apple received:
$150 million for some non-voting stock. This was a drop in the bucket compared to Apple's net worth, let alone Microsoft's net worth at the time.
Guaranteed Office on the Mac for the next 5 years at least.
PR stunt to show that Apple was down but not out
That deal has expired at this point, but Apple is now a stronger company than they were at that time, and MS is weaker. I'd say Apple actually got the better end of that deal. (So maybe it wasn't "mutually beneficial", but Apple didn't come out on the short end.)
This "deal" as you put it was not a joint business venture, which is where most companies get eaten alive by Microsoft. It was merely a transaction. Apple has done since then what Apple has always done: innovate. iPod and OSX are prime examples of this. And Microsoft, Microsoft has done since then what Microsoft has always done: imitate. Zune and Vista are prime examples of this. If one company seems to be suffering relative to the other today, it's only because one is literally years behind what the other one has been doing so well for so long.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like MTV is now Youtube, USENET is now Google Groups.
Same thing, different name.
Quick! Time to socialize more of the economy and raise taxes! </irony>
> Framemaker?
Acrobat.
Before you buy a Das Keyboard for a Mac Mini, you should really check out the switch-based keyboard I use with my Mac Mini. I use the SMK-88. http://www.notestation.com/smk-88.htm
The keyboard is small, but the keys are full-sized. It has no numeric keypad, but it does have F-keys. The eject-disc keys and the volume keys work fine with the Mac. And again, the wonderful switch-based keys provide excellent tactile and auditory feedback while typing. There is no USB hub, but you do get a USB-2 pass-thru.
Also at around $85, you'll save some cash relative to the price of a new Das Keyboard.
Add to that the fact that IBM didn't mind hobbling their microcomputer with the x86 architecture. It was in their best interest at that time because they were still making lots of money on minicomputers and mainframes. A clean microcomputer architecture that was both efficient and easy-to-extend would only grow faster and eat their main business-sales that much quicker.
In any event, they lost control of the PC platform when the clones entered the market. And ironically, cloning is what helped pump enough money into the market to encourage Intel to patch up the x86's deficiencies.
Should have bought a Mac!
Good information, Jonadab! I recognized your nick from the Emacs color-theme package. Thanks for the fine work you did on your color-themes. I particularly like "Gnome," and "Jonadabian Slate." Keep up the good work!
My recommendation for anyone getting into programming is to watch the SICP videos. If you're completely new to programming, this subject matter may be a little deep. But if you are anxious to get past the scripting level of programming and into the methods for organising, planning, and thinking about programming, there is no better introduction.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Two points:
Not every boss is a genius, or the founder of a company like Apple Inc.
I have a seven-year-old child who needs to drive around town in a car, but has problems getting the keys. Is there anyone on Slashdot who has suggestions on how to open, start, and operate a car without keys and otherwise make it so easy even a seven-year-old can do it? Thanks! Signed, A Responsible Human Being
I recommend not leaving a seven year old unsupervised in a park, in a house, or on a computer.
Tastes like chicken!
And you might want to check your credit balance before you whip out your credit card for one: "At US$18,000 for a holographic disk drive, InPhase has priced its product roughly mid-point between a $30,000 enterprise-class tape drive and midrange tape drives such as LTO tape drives, which go for around $4,000. The holographic platters will retail for $180 each." Of course, this is the amount they are charging for the 300GB version that was supposed to start shipping back in July. But you should be able to get this today -- if not "today."
You know, religion is one of the key institutions outside of jail and "public education" that encourage people to reduce alcohol, drug addiction, HIV, spousal abuse, and illegitimacy. It seems to me you need all the help you can get in the "War on Error." So does it really make sense to undermine any ally in a situation like this? Is the school/jail solution really performing so well, that we can do without our single most important tradition for encouraging of hope, self-reliance, and mutual respect?
Before we subsidize the science/engineering market for Big Business, why don't we remove the previous subsidy, the H1B visas? Otherwise we are just following the usual government template, which is to interfere in a market, and then try to fix the fallout from that interference (H1B to keep supply costs down) by interfering in the market some more (free degrees to Americans to compete against the low-cost H1B). Nah. This makes too much sense and cuts out the government middle-man. Congress will never go for that.
- $150 million in non-voting Apple stock that had nowhere to go but UP. Note: if they still ahve this stock right now, it's worth billions!
- The end of numerous expensive old court cases brought against Microsoft by Apple Computer.
- IE installed as the default on Mac desktops (I had almost forgotten this one).
- Microsoft PR stunt to show the DOJ that they weren't actively destroying all competition.
In return for what they gave Microsoft, Apple received:- $150 million for some non-voting stock. This was a drop in the bucket compared to Apple's net worth, let alone Microsoft's net worth at the time.
- Guaranteed Office on the Mac for the next 5 years at least.
- PR stunt to show that Apple was down but not out
This "deal" as you put it was not a joint business venture, which is where most companies get eaten alive by Microsoft. It was merely a transaction. Apple has done since then what Apple has always done: innovate. iPod and OSX are prime examples of this. And Microsoft, Microsoft has done since then what Microsoft has always done: imitate. Zune and Vista are prime examples of this. If one company seems to be suffering relative to the other today, it's only because one is literally years behind what the other one has been doing so well for so long.Public education is a factory solution to a hand-made problem.