To be fair, I've been in the same situation. They send a few letters (4 or 5). They come around to the house. They send a final notice with instructions on how to notify them that you don't have a TV, and then they eventually issue a summons. I assume your friend was just as much of an arsehole as we were, and wanted to "stick it to the man". Hell, we were students, what was his excuse ?
Back then (more years ago than I care to remember) it seemed pretty damn funny. These days, I (almost:-) blush to recall what we got up to... all part of growing up I suppose.
We railed against the system for forcing us to pay for a licence that we might not have wanted (actually there were 3 TV's in the house, just none when the TV inspectors came with their warrants). It wasn't right. There were plenty of opportunities to correct any mistake. Frankly it became something of a game *because* there were so many hoops you had to jump through to get to court... We had a daily bulletin-board message about it... yeah, this was before things like/....
I guess the point I'm making is that you can disagree with the TV licence (but those that do don't tend to be those subjected to US TV!), but you have to go out of your way to actually be prosecuted. Frankly, given how easy it is to circumvent prosecution, I'm amazed *anyone* is successfully prosecuted...
I think that speaks volumes for your lack of sense of humour. Off-the-cuff, he's managed to (a) subtlely let people know Apple employees are looked after, and (b) deflect the question with a humorous response.
Steve's a private guy - he wants the limelight on his terms (eg: when he's doing a keynote). Telling the questioner to mind their own fucking business might be more appealing, but it's not-so-much the company line. Damn, I'll never make a CEO:-(
The very first thing I thought of too. I've lived in London, Liverpool, Cornwall and Middlesborough, and I've never heard a single person mention ID.
It is, however, easy to lead people into agreeing with you by careful positioning of the questions. Given the slant on the BBC website (the figures were all biased towards evolution, but the headlines all mention ID/Creationism), I'd *really* like to see the questions...
It seems Ryan falls into the 'why run Linux on a Mac' camp - witness the pretty pie chart of "users that plan to install Linux on their new Macbooks"... It has two slices... (a) Linux users who think Macs are pretty, and (b) Mac users who think a Linux partition makes them "L337"...
Comments like "User demand for Linux on Apple's Intel-based hardware does exist within the dual-boot crowd, but I doubt that anybody wants to run Linux exclusively on their shiny new Macbook", and "pretty cases aside..." don't help either. There *are* people who only run Linux on their laptops (hell, I used to be one), but the vast majority of people I've ever asked dual-boot a laptop. Any x86 laptop, that is.
I think it does a disservice to both Linux users and Mac users to dismiss the porting effort like this - people will buy Macs (when Windows eventually runs) to have the most-compatible machine (laptop or desktop). I think that's an advantage for the Mac (run corporate email and Final-Cut-Pro for example), and I think Linux has appeal too, at least, it does for me. I guess I don't really see the downside of the port...
Read the original post - the guy said the compilation took significantly less time - arguing over the details isn't relevant to anyone who wants their compilation to go faster, and no-one apart from you mentioned multi-threaded compilers...
Who cares if it's gcc or make that's causing the speed-up? It. runs. faster.
Go to the home page for the imac - where you get taken whenever you click on an imac on the site.
Clearly next to the 2x image are the specific benchmark names and values.
You're just trying to find fault. For the record, I don't think you have to be tech-literate to read small-print. Contracts have had small-print long long before we had computers...
[sigh] It would be foolish beyond belief to quote non-reproducible benchmarks that are part of a standard set. That's why I believe the figures. I've never had occasion to disbelieve the figures on SPEC benchmarks from any of the major computer manufacturers. You can bet that MS will duplicate the tests and would cry foul if they were markedly different...
So, no, he wasn't lying, and he wasn't being deliberately deceitful (that part was where - immediately after showing the figures - he said "you may not see this in real-world results"). I would say that was remarkably honest from a company CEO, actually...
I was referring more to the change from Altivec to SSE(x) rather than SSE2 to SSE3. One of the big "wins" for Altivec is the permute instruction, and there's no equivalent in SSE (yet, as far as I know). It takes ~60 clocks in SSE to do what permute does if you code it in SSE, and that's a lose.
The solution, then, is to redesign the algorithm so it doesn't use permute too much, and that's a lot more than a recompile. That's why I think it'll get better...
The title was the benchmark-name. The introduction was about the industry-standard nature of the benchmark, and the disclaimer was that real-world performance may not reflect that. The idea was to show the isolated CPU gains.
To be fair, Steve's statements were absolutely 100% accurate (assuming the figures are accurate, which I expect them to be). For that benchmark, the intel machine is 2x-3x faster. If anyone really expected them to provide not-the-best-benchmark-results, can I have some of what you're smoking ? And I have several bridges to sell you too...
My point is that the story write-up makes it sound like SJ is lying, and he's not. He's just presenting the best set of benchmarks he can, which is pretty much what I expect from the CEO of the company...
As for the multimedia-style benchmarks presented in the review, I think you can expect those to improve as Apple gets its collective head around SSE3. I would have thought the G5/G4 implementations would have been altivec'd to hell and back, and SSE doesn't have the immensely useful 'permute' operation, so the transform operation will have to be rewritten to SSE's strengths - I doubt that has happened yet...
Well worth a read, if you like to embarrass yourself by bursting out in uncontrollable laughter on a train/bus/whatever. And no, it's not an affiliate link or anything like that:-)
I moved to the USA from the UK, and I pay more (percentage-wise) tax here in CA than I did in London, and that's *after* going to HR-Block to get as much off as I can. I averaged around 38% in the UK (after expenses and including national-insurance), and here my bill is more like 43% after federal and state tax.
Going to buy a house in the New Year (been saving all year for the deposit - $800k for a house is almost as bad as London!) so I'll get a larger tax-break then, but I rented in London too...
It is usually very difficult to know if and when the author died
Que?
We have these things called "death certificates", which have a person's name and date of death on them. Failing that, as the poster above said, poking the potentially-deceased with a pointy stick tends to work wonders...
It has nothing to do with bravery - it has to do with proof.
Council for the prosecution: "Your honour, he killed him with the lead piping in the drawing room." Defendant: "No I didn't" Judge: "Do you have any proof ?" Council for the prosecution " Well, no. But we think he did" Judge "Don't waste my time"
As long as it's not a direct line to the RIAA, then the MAC address is only known by the next link up the chain.
My simple linksys (cheap, $70) router can fake MAC addresses while providing DHCP to the inside of the network - all accesses appear to be one computer, precisely to get around ISP's limiting the MAC addresses they'll serve to.
1) Securityfocus is owned by a company with a vested interest in selling anti-virus software to Mac (and PC) users. It does serve a useful purpose, but when the points made are so vague, I consider it more advertising than service.
Say I wanted to market X, and say that I'm a sneaky and underhand individual. I might purchase or support a website dedicated either to X or anti-X and have *some* articles on it that suit my purpose. I wouldn't undermine the integrity of the site (well, much), but I would use it as an authoratitive mouthpiece that mouthed off about *my* preferred direction.
So, ok I'm a cynic, but so far my cynicism has been proved right depressingly often. Sigh.
2) "Looking at the numbers" is no useful guide to pretty much anything to do with security. The phrase works when the numbers themselves are the pertinent facts (eg: a bank-balance sheet). "Humans are obviously not the dominant species on the planet - there are millions more houseflys. Look at the numbers".
The point is that one dose of cancer can kill you, but you may survive fifty or more infections of the common cold without significant harm. The numbers don't tell you the relative importance of the problem, and indeed may just reflect different counting methods or diligence in detection.
There was indeed OSX software on the disk, but (a) they don't install automatically, you have to actively search out and install the DRM by hand (as if!) and (b) it's not a rootkit, it's 'just' DRM. The files it installs are bonafide kernel modules, and can be removed by typing 'rm ' at the prompt, or dragging them to the trashcan.
First, very small amounts of the US have higher rates for theft *OR* violent crime than England. Those places also have a significantly higher population density than London.
Second, most places in the US with very high proliferation of firearms have much lower crime rates than England.
Neither of which explains why there are ~11,000 fatal shootings in the US per year, and only ~35 in the UK. This is using the OP's figures, I haven't looked it up, but I do know it's a major news event when someone gets shot in the UK. There was one (1) local (within a few miles) shooting in my 15 years of living in London...
[snip pointless rant about history - that of which you speak was in place before your country was. The founding fathers went to the new world to seek religious freedom, not to escape any royal censure. It's easy to claim a clean history when you haven't had much of it, apart from the whole slavery thing, of course. Oh yeah - freedom for *whites*...]
As for your last comment, let me re-iterate. I'd rather be stabbed than shot, too. I have a higher chance of survival. I'd rather be hit by a blunt object than shot too. I have a higher chance of survival. Perhaps it *is* just us who see the advantage...
Actually, looking at the figures, and (being generous) given that the US has some 5x the UK population, there must be some *really* *really* nasty places in the USA if your two assertions are to hold. 5x35 = 175. 175:11,000 ~= 1:63...
Take the plank from your own eye before you try to remove the splinter from mine (or something like that, I never paid much attention to that religious bollocks - the lesson is valid though)
Um, that *is* optic flow, with some extra information thrown in for the higher-resolution stuff. They're not using the temporal averaging to gain information, they're using it to register areas of interest that can be enhanced using more information, and gain a subjective benefit in appearance.
Never mind TFA, this is just payback time for the 'freedom fries' jibes... None of your nasty closed-source software - we will 'ave the free(dom) software instead!
Sorry, I ought to have said "In reality, the final decision is by humans, not computer". I knew there was a first-pass by computers - it's in the link further down the post.
The UK use computers to narrow the search too - when doing my image processing PhD (18 years ago now), we did some work for the Home Office.
[aside] Interesting note - their idea of a firewall was to have one computer in the building attached to the public networks, and a tape drive. You could store data from the internet on a tape in the drive, then walk over to another computer attached to the internal computer and copy data onto the internal network. All keypresses were logged and you were under video surveillance at all times... Of course this was when the 'net was just taking off, so they were probably being more paranoid/cautious than they needed to be, but still, they took data-security very seriously - I've been in military bases since with less security... [/aside]
All it did was point me to the fact that you are a raving dickweed that is in need of yearly jury duty for the rest of your life. Your bowtie and religious/biblical objections to "judging" someone shouldn't stop the lawyers from placing you in the deepest juror hell that they can find
Ah, a reasoned, cogent, well-developed and systematic argument. Truly, this is the pinnacle of what slashdot can hope to achieve. The best part of all is that this credible and compelling litany of reason was posted by a coward, hiding in anonymity so the rest of the community didn't worship at the coward's feet. You, sir, are an example to us all.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, I've been in the same situation. They send a few letters (4 or 5). They come around to the house. They send a final notice with instructions on how to notify them that you don't have a TV, and then they eventually issue a summons. I assume your friend was just as much of an arsehole as we were, and wanted to "stick it to the man". Hell, we were students, what was his excuse ?
:-) blush to recall what we got up to ... all part of growing up I suppose.
/. ...
Back then (more years ago than I care to remember) it seemed pretty damn funny. These days, I (almost
We railed against the system for forcing us to pay for a licence that we might not have wanted (actually there were 3 TV's in the house, just none when the TV inspectors came with their warrants). It wasn't right. There were plenty of opportunities to correct any mistake. Frankly it became something of a game *because* there were so many hoops you had to jump through to get to court... We had a daily bulletin-board message about it... yeah, this was before things like
I guess the point I'm making is that you can disagree with the TV licence (but those that do don't tend to be those subjected to US TV!), but you have to go out of your way to actually be prosecuted. Frankly, given how easy it is to circumvent prosecution, I'm amazed *anyone* is successfully prosecuted...
Simon
I think that speaks volumes for your lack of sense of humour. Off-the-cuff, he's managed to (a) subtlely let people know Apple employees are looked after, and (b) deflect the question with a humorous response.
:-(
Steve's a private guy - he wants the limelight on his terms (eg: when he's doing a keynote). Telling the questioner to mind their own fucking business might be more appealing, but it's not-so-much the company line. Damn, I'll never make a CEO
Simon
Indeed, 1-2, 1-2, and through, and through :-)
I'd like to see the mome that could rath ME! (well, when I've got a vorpal blade, anyway...)
Simon
The very first thing I thought of too. I've lived in London, Liverpool, Cornwall and Middlesborough, and I've never heard a single person mention ID.
It is, however, easy to lead people into agreeing with you by careful positioning of the questions. Given the slant on the BBC website (the figures were all biased towards evolution, but the headlines all mention ID/Creationism), I'd *really* like to see the questions...
Simon
It seems Ryan falls into the 'why run Linux on a Mac' camp - witness the pretty pie chart of "users that plan to install Linux on their new Macbooks"... It has two slices ... (a) Linux users who think Macs are pretty, and (b) Mac users who think a Linux partition makes them "L337"...
Comments like "User demand for Linux on Apple's Intel-based hardware does exist within the dual-boot crowd, but I doubt that anybody wants to run Linux exclusively on their shiny new Macbook", and "pretty cases aside..." don't help either. There *are* people who only run Linux on their laptops (hell, I used to be one), but the vast majority of people I've ever asked dual-boot a laptop. Any x86 laptop, that is.
I think it does a disservice to both Linux users and Mac users to dismiss the porting effort like this - people will buy Macs (when Windows eventually runs) to have the most-compatible machine (laptop or desktop). I think that's an advantage for the Mac (run corporate email and Final-Cut-Pro for example), and I think Linux has appeal too, at least, it does for me. I guess I don't really see the downside of the port...
Simon.
Read the original post - the guy said the compilation took significantly less time - arguing over the details isn't relevant to anyone who wants their compilation to go faster, and no-one apart from you mentioned multi-threaded compilers...
Who cares if it's gcc or make that's causing the speed-up? It. runs. faster.
Simon
Go to the home page for the imac - where you get taken whenever you click on an imac on the site.
Clearly next to the 2x image are the specific benchmark names and values.
You're just trying to find fault. For the record, I don't think you have to be tech-literate to read small-print. Contracts have had small-print long long before we had computers...
Simon
[sigh] It would be foolish beyond belief to quote non-reproducible benchmarks that are part of a standard set. That's why I believe the figures. I've never had occasion to disbelieve the figures on SPEC benchmarks from any of the major computer manufacturers. You can bet that MS will duplicate the tests and would cry foul if they were markedly different...
So, no, he wasn't lying, and he wasn't being deliberately deceitful (that part was where - immediately after showing the figures - he said "you may not see this in real-world results"). I would say that was remarkably honest from a company CEO, actually...
It ain't me who's biased/blinkered here...
Simon.
I was referring more to the change from Altivec to SSE(x) rather than SSE2 to SSE3. One of the big "wins" for Altivec is the permute instruction, and there's no equivalent in SSE (yet, as far as I know). It takes ~60 clocks in SSE to do what permute does if you code it in SSE, and that's a lose.
The solution, then, is to redesign the algorithm so it doesn't use permute too much, and that's a lot more than a recompile. That's why I think it'll get better...
Simon
The title was the benchmark-name. The introduction was about the industry-standard nature of the benchmark, and the disclaimer was that real-world performance may not reflect that. The idea was to show the isolated CPU gains.
Seems pretty straight-forward to me.
Simon
To be fair, Steve's statements were absolutely 100% accurate (assuming the figures are accurate, which I expect them to be). For that benchmark, the intel machine is 2x-3x faster. If anyone really expected them to provide not-the-best-benchmark-results, can I have some of what you're smoking ? And I have several bridges to sell you too...
My point is that the story write-up makes it sound like SJ is lying, and he's not. He's just presenting the best set of benchmarks he can, which is pretty much what I expect from the CEO of the company...
As for the multimedia-style benchmarks presented in the review, I think you can expect those to improve as Apple gets its collective head around SSE3. I would have thought the G5/G4 implementations would have been altivec'd to hell and back, and SSE doesn't have the immensely useful 'permute' operation, so the transform operation will have to be rewritten to SSE's strengths - I doubt that has happened yet...
Simon.
Sounds like a Miss Hazelstone moment....
:-)
Well worth a read, if you like to embarrass yourself by bursting out in uncontrollable laughter on a train/bus/whatever. And no, it's not an affiliate link or anything like that
Simon
I moved to the USA from the UK, and I pay more (percentage-wise) tax here in CA than I did in London, and that's *after* going to HR-Block to get as much off as I can. I averaged around 38% in the UK (after expenses and including national-insurance), and here my bill is more like 43% after federal and state tax.
Going to buy a house in the New Year (been saving all year for the deposit - $800k for a house is almost as bad as London!) so I'll get a larger tax-break then, but I rented in London too...
Simon
It is usually very difficult to know if and when the author died
Que?
We have these things called "death certificates", which have a person's name and date of death on them. Failing that, as the poster above said, poking the potentially-deceased with a pointy stick tends to work wonders...
Simon
It has nothing to do with bravery - it has to do with proof.
Council for the prosecution: "Your honour, he killed him with the lead piping in the drawing room."
Defendant: "No I didn't"
Judge: "Do you have any proof ?"
Council for the prosecution " Well, no. But we think he did"
Judge "Don't waste my time"
end of case.
Simon
As long as it's not a direct line to the RIAA, then the MAC address is only known by the next link up the chain.
My simple linksys (cheap, $70) router can fake MAC addresses while providing DHCP to the inside of the network - all accesses appear to be one computer, precisely to get around ISP's limiting the MAC addresses they'll serve to.
So, I reckon his defence is pretty damn good.
Simon.
1) Securityfocus is owned by a company with a vested interest in selling anti-virus software to Mac (and PC) users. It does serve a useful purpose, but when the points made are so vague, I consider it more advertising than service.
Say I wanted to market X, and say that I'm a sneaky and underhand individual. I might purchase or support a website dedicated either to X or anti-X and have *some* articles on it that suit my purpose. I wouldn't undermine the integrity of the site (well, much), but I would use it as an authoratitive mouthpiece that mouthed off about *my* preferred direction.
So, ok I'm a cynic, but so far my cynicism has been proved right depressingly often. Sigh.
2) "Looking at the numbers" is no useful guide to pretty much anything to do with security. The phrase works when the numbers themselves are the pertinent facts (eg: a bank-balance sheet). "Humans are obviously not the dominant species on the planet - there are millions more houseflys. Look at the numbers".
The point is that one dose of cancer can kill you, but you may survive fifty or more infections of the common cold without significant harm. The numbers don't tell you the relative importance of the problem, and indeed may just reflect different counting methods or diligence in detection.
Simon.
Re: regional. Must be, because I've never heard of Hastings...
Simon
There was indeed OSX software on the disk, but (a) they don't install automatically, you have to actively search out and install the DRM by hand (as if!) and (b) it's not a rootkit, it's 'just' DRM. The files it installs are bonafide kernel modules, and can be removed by typing 'rm ' at the prompt, or dragging them to the trashcan.
Simon
First, very small amounts of the US have higher rates for theft *OR* violent crime than England. Those places also have a significantly higher population density than London.
Second, most places in the US with very high proliferation of firearms have much lower crime rates than England.
Neither of which explains why there are ~11,000 fatal shootings in the US per year, and only ~35 in the UK. This is using the OP's figures, I haven't looked it up, but I do know it's a major news event when someone gets shot in the UK. There was one (1) local (within a few miles) shooting in my 15 years of living in London...
[snip pointless rant about history - that of which you speak was in place before your country was. The founding fathers went to the new world to seek religious freedom, not to escape any royal censure. It's easy to claim a clean history when you haven't had much of it, apart from the whole slavery thing, of course. Oh yeah - freedom for *whites*...]
As for your last comment, let me re-iterate. I'd rather be stabbed than shot, too. I have a higher chance of survival. I'd rather be hit by a blunt object than shot too. I have a higher chance of survival. Perhaps it *is* just us who see the advantage...
Actually, looking at the figures, and (being generous) given that the US has some 5x the UK population, there must be some *really* *really* nasty places in the USA if your two assertions are to hold. 5x35 = 175. 175:11,000 ~= 1:63...
Take the plank from your own eye before you try to remove the splinter from mine (or something like that, I never paid much attention to that religious bollocks - the lesson is valid though)
Simon
Well tickle me pink and call me Norman, but I'd rather have my car stolen than my brains blown out.
Maybe it's just us Brits that see the advantage.
Simon.
Um, that *is* optic flow, with some extra information thrown in for the higher-resolution stuff. They're not using the temporal averaging to gain information, they're using it to register areas of interest that can be enhanced using more information, and gain a subjective benefit in appearance.
Simon.
Never mind TFA, this is just payback time for the 'freedom fries' jibes... None of your nasty closed-source software - we will 'ave the free(dom) software instead!
:-)
Oh, and I spit in your general direction!
Simon
Sorry, I ought to have said "In reality, the final decision is by humans, not computer". I knew there was a first-pass by computers - it's in the link further down the post.
The UK use computers to narrow the search too - when doing my image processing PhD (18 years ago now), we did some work for the Home Office.
[aside]
Interesting note - their idea of a firewall was to have one computer in the building attached to the public networks, and a tape drive. You could store data from the internet on a tape in the drive, then walk over to another computer attached to the internal computer and copy data onto the internal network. All keypresses were logged and you were under video surveillance at all times... Of course this was when the 'net was just taking off, so they were probably being more paranoid/cautious than they needed to be, but still, they took data-security very seriously - I've been in military bases since with less security...
[/aside]
Simon.
Ah, a reasoned, cogent, well-developed and systematic argument. Truly, this is the pinnacle of what slashdot can hope to achieve. The best part of all is that this credible and compelling litany of reason was posted by a coward, hiding in anonymity so the rest of the community didn't worship at the coward's feet. You, sir, are an example to us all.
Simon