the driver and open software availability are just crap compared to any modern Linux distro (or even cygwin on windows). Drivers are in issue possibly for some exotic hardware, but overall I haven't had a problem. As for open source availability? This really confuses me. There's Fink and there's DarwinPorts. Both have a large collection of ports to OS X.
a quality mac usb keyboard with mechanical key switches costs between 90-150USD while the equivalent for PC can be hand for practically nothing Huh? If it's USB, it's USB and it will work on a mac. If you're saying that you can get an old PS/2 mechanical keyboard and use it on your PC, well, fine. I personally can't fault Apple for not supporting an ancient technology. The problem is that pretty soon there will be no PCs with PS/2 anymore. Mice are the same.
If OS X is "the best 'nix [you]'ve ever used" then please tell us why, I'm still waiting for real reasons.
Okay, I'll bite.
Application Support
Unfortunately for me, I tend to prefer Microsoft Office over OpenOffice. There's no Microsoft Office in Linux, FreeBSD, etc. In reality, this is a shame, because I spend most of my time using LaTeX and it stinks that when I do need an "office app" I have to resort to Microsoft Office since I consider it a better application. Also, there's no Photoshop for Linux, etc. Please don't say GIMP. I actually learned on GIMP and would much prefer to use it over Photoshop, but there's no true color calibration system for Linux. Aperture is also on OS X and I don't really have a desire to use anything else to manage photos.
User Interface
I loathed the OS X interface when I first started using it. In fact, the day I got my PowerBook G4 (my first Mac, about 3.5 years ago), I spent all of 10 minutes in OS X. And I spend that time while I was figuring out how to install Debian on it. I ran Debian on my PowerBook for a year or more. I decided to try out OS X and haven't looked back. Well, I did for a bit, because the UI was a bit different to me. Since getting used to the UI, I would never like to go back to traditional UNIX desktops.
It just works.
When I come from home from work and need to do something on my computer, I don't want to have to worry about it. I don't want to worry, for instance, if the new kernel I apt-geted broke my VMWare installation and now requires a module recompile. I don't have the time, nor the energy, to care anymore. OS X is for the practical inside of me. OS X is for the artist inside of me. OS X is for the lazy inside of me.
So you could have a RAID 5 of generators. I guess that would be RABG 5 of them. If you need 2 kw then get 3 1kw generators.
In the industry, this is called N+1 redundancy. Most data centers supporting some sort of "critical" infrastructure have 2N redundancy in generators--meaning half the generators could fail to start and the whole infrastructure would still be powered.
however I thought that the generators and motors were DC, not AC.
Doubtful. The thing that makes a generator produce DC and a motor run of AC is a commutator. Since you need one in each to generate DC and then use it, not using them in the first place makes more sense.
Run Fink and you should be good as far as package management. If you want gnome-terminal, run gnome-terminal. OS X has support for X Window, so I don't understand why that's a problem. LaTeX is great on OS X. I use Textmate as my editor and it edits LaTeX better than any non-OS X editor I've ever used.
You tried using 'Virtual Keyboard [thinkgeek.com]' with a bluetooth phone?
How would this help me? I can already hit buttons faster with my thumb than it can display. How would having 8 fingers to input be better? And on top of it, my biggest problem isn't text entry, it's navigating menus.
the phone market has a number of players that spend all of there efforts innovating
Have you ever used a cell phone recently? They all suck. Not just suck a little, but suck a lot. I should *not* be able to enter commands on a cell phone faster than it can recognize them. That's just ridiculous. Unfortunately, that's how it is on my 2 year old Samsung and my fiancée's couple-month-old RAZR. That sad thing is that my B&W Nokia phone from 2000ish was fine in that regard. What happened? Remind me who's innovating with cell phones. They all seem like they've taken a step back.
Apple making a phone is the only real hope that I'll ever have a phone that properly syncs with iCal, Address Book and can do decent email. The only thing close to it right now is a Treo. As it stands, the syncing is mediocre, not perfect.
Hooking up with an online collection of photos might be new I guess - but that seems an obvious thing to do.
Yea, I hate to preempt any of the people who have come up with things like this, but I hope no one tries to patent any of these ideas. It's sort of a process that's implicitly defined by the existence multiresolution image decomposition. We shall see.
Haar wavelet though? While it's easier computationally (since the mother/father wavelets are peicewise linear in the 1D case) I always saw it as being a "lesser" wavelet in the sense of compression/reconstruction quality and ability to discern edges/other dramatic changes in data
I'm just saying what imgSeek uses. It's certainly a very easy wavelet to implement via lifting. I think it's probably used because more complex wavelets wouldn't be of any help since the rough drawing is so rough to begin with. In the end you could probably do the same thing with a DCT. Wish I had time to experiment.
I read about this a little while ago. Same principle. It uses a Haar transform (for those unfamiliar with multimedia signal processing and wavelets, specifically, the Haar transform is a specific wavelet transform based on the Haar wavelet and the associated orthogonal basis). The idea is that you compare the low frequency component of an image to the low frequency component of a rough drawing (which is pretty low frequency to begin with) and they should be pretty close of the images have anything in common.
Yes, I believe so. My nano (from December 2005) has never been plugged into anything but my Mac and it is Windows formatted. On the other hand, my original 3rd Gen is HFS+. That was real fun when I ran Linux on my PowerBook. Worked better than expected, actually.
Take the word "hacker" for an example of how words evolve to mean total opposites in a matter of decades.
This is so true. What's funny is that I read an article in the WSJ during my train ride into NYC one morning and kinda chuckled over the fact that the article said how "hacker" has now gained a good connotation and "it has shed its nefarious undertones." The point of the article was that "hacker" used to mean bad bad computer villain and now it's a term for a clever computer person. What made me laugh is that the author was completely blind to the fact that the original meaning of hacker didnt have a negative connotation associated with it and that really people are just now using it more along the lines of its original meaning (albeit somewhat deviated). I made a mental note to email the author to alert him to this fact. I forgot to do that, but many people didn't. Seems like the MIT folk were the quickest to chime in with comments such as:
When I was at the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT in the mid-1960s working for Marvin Minsky, the word "hack" referred to a clever bit of programming: for instance, one might work for several days in order to save a word or two of memory. (In the days before mass online storage, saving a word or two of memory might make the difference between a program running and not running.)
or
This is an addition to your history of the words "hack" and "hacker." At MIT, a "hack" has meant (for at least 40 years, maybe more) a very clever, and usually very public, prank. The rules have always been that the hack must be ethical and not do permanent damage. Typically, they require great planning and teamwork (in addition to secrecy) by the students who perpetrate the hack.
Umm. This story would never be on Slashdot if it weren't for the fact that it's Hans Reiser. The only relevant question to be asked in the first place (on Slashdot) is how this affects the project. Otherwise, why bother posting it?
Actually, engineers care about this a lot. Inexperienced people take a formula and assume it works under all conditions. However, when you take a [good] numerical analysis course, you'll do more than just learn how to use a formula. You'll spend time doing a lot of real analysis that you don't necessarily enjoy doing (I didn't) but the point is clear. A lot of times we really, really, care about existence of solutions. At times, we even care about the uniqueness of such solutions. Or, how about convergence of the series we're approximating a function with? Or maybe, does this Fourier series really work on this set of data that has a bunch of discontinuities in it?
Here is what happens when such problems aren't approached with proper rigor. In short, we read (regarding an offshore oil drilling platform):
The post accident investigation traced the error to inaccurate finite element approximation of the linear elastic model of the tricell (using the popular finite element program NASTRAN). The shear stresses were underestimated by 47%, leading to insufficient design. In particular, certain concrete walls were not thick enough. More careful finite element analysis, made after the accident, predicted that failure would occur with this design at a depth of 62m, which matches well with the actual occurrence at 65m.
So, yes, engineers VERY MUCH care about these things.
My money has Google and MS getting slaughtered by Apple here.
Google is too smart to walk right into a battle with Apple. My guess is they will try to seek some mutually beneficial arrangement with Apple. Don't forget this.
Yea, it's interesting since you can form a basis for the spatial dimensions with any 3 linearly independent vectors. Unfortunately "six axis" is an already used [misleading] term.
A MBTF of 600,000 hours means that if you have, say, 600,000 drives within their 5-year (generally) design life, you can expect about 1 drive to fail every hour, or a yearly failure rate of about 1.5%.
You're assuming a very dangerous thing... that the distribution of failures is flat. It's not. It follows the bathtub curve.
I have a 49G that failed miserably (the power button stopped working and since it's a capacitive key... there's no real easy way to fix it). I replaced it with a HP 48GX, which I love. However, I thought it would be nice to have a newer one which is easier to load stuff on to (since my laptop and desktop don't have serial ports) and has more memory expandability. I just ordered a 50G last night after reading a lot of great reviews. I hope to be impressed yet again. It's nice they have SD.
Maybe bike riders should get a "right" to be on the same road after they get a license, demonstrate knowledge of the law and tag their bikes with identification so they can be held responsible for breaking it? (in addition to previously mentioned being able to travel at the same speed as traffic.. good luck)
Frankly, what right do you have to be on the road? I drive much more than I ride my bike on the road, mainly because I mountain bike and when I'm on the road it's just getting to and from trails. I don't see what "right" you have more than a cyclist does to be on a road. Frankly, I don't think people should need a "license" to drive a vehicle. In a perfect world, anyone should be able to drive anything, anywhere. Obviously, that's not going to work so instead make it a more market-like system. Sell a certain number of vehicle "spots" and allow insurance companies to "sponsor" certain drivers. If you're a good driver, you can drive. If you have no demonstrably effective driving record, you have to pay up to drive. Maybe then we'd have safer roads.
It's the same as Terminal... except slow as can be. I don't know if I just type faster than most people do, but iTerm cannot keep up with my typing. It feels like I'm typing over a slow console connection. Googling for the answer as to why just reveals that iTerm is slow, and that's how it is. Look at the comments here, for instance.
This one is a bit more subtle, but it annoys me more than the "feeds" and "stories" thing. I'm bothered by the fact that the "education" section used to be one of the first things you saw when you logged in. Now it requires scrolling. This echos the whole fact that facebook is moving towards a more general, myspace-like site. I only found the site useful because I could find people in my classes and ask them questions if need be. All this other stuff is starting to get superfluous, and clutter-like.
Have you ever tried to get Oracle running on anything but Red Hat?
A little while ago, I would have agreed that Oracle has the most unfriendly installation ever. But look at the Oracle Express product. Here's how I installed it:
apt-get install oracle-xe
I'm not kidding, either. Check it out here. (The article applies to Kubuntu, I think, but I installed it on vanilla debian just fine)
No, certain consumers would pay more. The reason I don't want to pay for your cable is the same as the reason why I don't want to pay for your health care, welfare, and social security.
Slashdot Mirror
the driver and open software availability are just crap compared to any modern Linux distro (or even cygwin on windows).
Drivers are in issue possibly for some exotic hardware, but overall I haven't had a problem. As for open source availability? This really confuses me. There's Fink and there's DarwinPorts. Both have a large collection of ports to OS X.
a quality mac usb keyboard with mechanical key switches costs between 90-150USD while the equivalent for PC can be hand for practically nothing
Huh? If it's USB, it's USB and it will work on a mac. If you're saying that you can get an old PS/2 mechanical keyboard and use it on your PC, well, fine. I personally can't fault Apple for not supporting an ancient technology. The problem is that pretty soon there will be no PCs with PS/2 anymore. Mice are the same.
Okay, I'll bite.
Unfortunately for me, I tend to prefer Microsoft Office over OpenOffice. There's no Microsoft Office in Linux, FreeBSD, etc. In reality, this is a shame, because I spend most of my time using LaTeX and it stinks that when I do need an "office app" I have to resort to Microsoft Office since I consider it a better application. Also, there's no Photoshop for Linux, etc. Please don't say GIMP. I actually learned on GIMP and would much prefer to use it over Photoshop, but there's no true color calibration system for Linux. Aperture is also on OS X and I don't really have a desire to use anything else to manage photos.
I loathed the OS X interface when I first started using it. In fact, the day I got my PowerBook G4 (my first Mac, about 3.5 years ago), I spent all of 10 minutes in OS X. And I spend that time while I was figuring out how to install Debian on it. I ran Debian on my PowerBook for a year or more. I decided to try out OS X and haven't looked back. Well, I did for a bit, because the UI was a bit different to me. Since getting used to the UI, I would never like to go back to traditional UNIX desktops.
When I come from home from work and need to do something on my computer, I don't want to have to worry about it. I don't want to worry, for instance, if the new kernel I apt-geted broke my VMWare installation and now requires a module recompile. I don't have the time, nor the energy, to care anymore. OS X is for the practical inside of me. OS X is for the artist inside of me. OS X is for the lazy inside of me.
So you could have a RAID 5 of generators. I guess that would be RABG 5 of them. If you need 2 kw then get 3 1kw generators.
In the industry, this is called N+1 redundancy. Most data centers supporting some sort of "critical" infrastructure have 2N redundancy in generators--meaning half the generators could fail to start and the whole infrastructure would still be powered.
however I thought that the generators and motors were DC, not AC.
Doubtful. The thing that makes a generator produce DC and a motor run of AC is a commutator. Since you need one in each to generate DC and then use it, not using them in the first place makes more sense.
Run Fink and you should be good as far as package management. If you want gnome-terminal, run gnome-terminal. OS X has support for X Window, so I don't understand why that's a problem. LaTeX is great on OS X. I use Textmate as my editor and it edits LaTeX better than any non-OS X editor I've ever used.
You tried using 'Virtual Keyboard [thinkgeek.com]' with a bluetooth phone?
How would this help me? I can already hit buttons faster with my thumb than it can display. How would having 8 fingers to input be better? And on top of it, my biggest problem isn't text entry, it's navigating menus.
the phone market has a number of players that spend all of there efforts innovating
Have you ever used a cell phone recently? They all suck. Not just suck a little, but suck a lot. I should *not* be able to enter commands on a cell phone faster than it can recognize them. That's just ridiculous. Unfortunately, that's how it is on my 2 year old Samsung and my fiancée's couple-month-old RAZR. That sad thing is that my B&W Nokia phone from 2000ish was fine in that regard. What happened? Remind me who's innovating with cell phones. They all seem like they've taken a step back.
Apple making a phone is the only real hope that I'll ever have a phone that properly syncs with iCal, Address Book and can do decent email. The only thing close to it right now is a Treo. As it stands, the syncing is mediocre, not perfect.
Piqued. Your interest is piqued.
Hooking up with an online collection of photos might be new I guess - but that seems an obvious thing to do.
Yea, I hate to preempt any of the people who have come up with things like this, but I hope no one tries to patent any of these ideas. It's sort of a process that's implicitly defined by the existence multiresolution image decomposition. We shall see.
Haar wavelet though? While it's easier computationally (since the mother/father wavelets are peicewise linear in the 1D case) I always saw it as being a "lesser" wavelet in the sense of compression/reconstruction quality and ability to discern edges/other dramatic changes in data
I'm just saying what imgSeek uses. It's certainly a very easy wavelet to implement via lifting. I think it's probably used because more complex wavelets wouldn't be of any help since the rough drawing is so rough to begin with. In the end you could probably do the same thing with a DCT. Wish I had time to experiment.
I read about this a little while ago. Same principle. It uses a Haar transform (for those unfamiliar with multimedia signal processing and wavelets, specifically, the Haar transform is a specific wavelet transform based on the Haar wavelet and the associated orthogonal basis). The idea is that you compare the low frequency component of an image to the low frequency component of a rough drawing (which is pretty low frequency to begin with) and they should be pretty close of the images have anything in common.
Or has the default FS on the iPod changed?
Yes, I believe so. My nano (from December 2005) has never been plugged into anything but my Mac and it is Windows formatted. On the other hand, my original 3rd Gen is HFS+. That was real fun when I ran Linux on my PowerBook. Worked better than expected, actually.
Take the word "hacker" for an example of how words evolve to mean total opposites in a matter of decades.
This is so true. What's funny is that I read an article in the WSJ during my train ride into NYC one morning and kinda chuckled over the fact that the article said how "hacker" has now gained a good connotation and "it has shed its nefarious undertones." The point of the article was that "hacker" used to mean bad bad computer villain and now it's a term for a clever computer person. What made me laugh is that the author was completely blind to the fact that the original meaning of hacker didnt have a negative connotation associated with it and that really people are just now using it more along the lines of its original meaning (albeit somewhat deviated). I made a mental note to email the author to alert him to this fact. I forgot to do that, but many people didn't. Seems like the MIT folk were the quickest to chime in with comments such as:
When I was at the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT in the mid-1960s working for Marvin Minsky, the word "hack" referred to a clever bit of programming: for instance, one might work for several days in order to save a word or two of memory. (In the days before mass online storage, saving a word or two of memory might make the difference between a program running and not running.)
or
This is an addition to your history of the words "hack" and "hacker." At MIT, a "hack" has meant (for at least 40 years, maybe more) a very clever, and usually very public, prank. The rules have always been that the hack must be ethical and not do permanent damage. Typically, they require great planning and teamwork (in addition to secrecy) by the students who perpetrate the hack.
For people with WSJ subscriptions:
Original Article
Readers' Comments
Classy kdawson, very classy.
Umm. This story would never be on Slashdot if it weren't for the fact that it's Hans Reiser. The only relevant question to be asked in the first place (on Slashdot) is how this affects the project. Otherwise, why bother posting it?
Actually, engineers care about this a lot. Inexperienced people take a formula and assume it works under all conditions. However, when you take a [good] numerical analysis course, you'll do more than just learn how to use a formula. You'll spend time doing a lot of real analysis that you don't necessarily enjoy doing (I didn't) but the point is clear. A lot of times we really, really, care about existence of solutions. At times, we even care about the uniqueness of such solutions. Or, how about convergence of the series we're approximating a function with? Or maybe, does this Fourier series really work on this set of data that has a bunch of discontinuities in it?
Here is what happens when such problems aren't approached with proper rigor. In short, we read (regarding an offshore oil drilling platform):
The post accident investigation traced the error to inaccurate finite element approximation of the linear elastic model of the tricell (using the popular finite element program NASTRAN). The shear stresses were underestimated by 47%, leading to insufficient design. In particular, certain concrete walls were not thick enough. More careful finite element analysis, made after the accident, predicted that failure would occur with this design at a depth of 62m, which matches well with the actual occurrence at 65m.
So, yes, engineers VERY MUCH care about these things.
My money has Google and MS getting slaughtered by Apple here.
Google is too smart to walk right into a battle with Apple. My guess is they will try to seek some mutually beneficial arrangement with Apple. Don't forget this.
Yea, it's interesting since you can form a basis for the spatial dimensions with any 3 linearly independent vectors. Unfortunately "six axis" is an already used [misleading] term.
A MBTF of 600,000 hours means that if you have, say, 600,000 drives within their 5-year (generally) design life, you can expect about 1 drive to fail every hour, or a yearly failure rate of about 1.5%.
You're assuming a very dangerous thing... that the distribution of failures is flat. It's not. It follows the bathtub curve.
I have a 49G that failed miserably (the power button stopped working and since it's a capacitive key... there's no real easy way to fix it). I replaced it with a HP 48GX, which I love. However, I thought it would be nice to have a newer one which is easier to load stuff on to (since my laptop and desktop don't have serial ports) and has more memory expandability. I just ordered a 50G last night after reading a lot of great reviews. I hope to be impressed yet again. It's nice they have SD.
And furthermore... HP calculators have supported some sort of expandable memory for some time now. Further proof that HP makes better calculators.
Maybe bike riders should get a "right" to be on the same road after they get a license, demonstrate knowledge of the law and tag their bikes with identification so they can be held responsible for breaking it? (in addition to previously mentioned being able to travel at the same speed as traffic.. good luck)
Frankly, what right do you have to be on the road? I drive much more than I ride my bike on the road, mainly because I mountain bike and when I'm on the road it's just getting to and from trails. I don't see what "right" you have more than a cyclist does to be on a road. Frankly, I don't think people should need a "license" to drive a vehicle. In a perfect world, anyone should be able to drive anything, anywhere. Obviously, that's not going to work so instead make it a more market-like system. Sell a certain number of vehicle "spots" and allow insurance companies to "sponsor" certain drivers. If you're a good driver, you can drive. If you have no demonstrably effective driving record, you have to pay up to drive. Maybe then we'd have safer roads.
It's the same as Terminal... except slow as can be. I don't know if I just type faster than most people do, but iTerm cannot keep up with my typing. It feels like I'm typing over a slow console connection. Googling for the answer as to why just reveals that iTerm is slow, and that's how it is. Look at the comments here, for instance.
This one is a bit more subtle, but it annoys me more than the "feeds" and "stories" thing. I'm bothered by the fact that the "education" section used to be one of the first things you saw when you logged in. Now it requires scrolling. This echos the whole fact that facebook is moving towards a more general, myspace-like site. I only found the site useful because I could find people in my classes and ask them questions if need be. All this other stuff is starting to get superfluous, and clutter-like.
A little while ago, I would have agreed that Oracle has the most unfriendly installation ever. But look at the Oracle Express product. Here's how I installed it:I'm not kidding, either. Check it out here. (The article applies to Kubuntu, I think, but I installed it on vanilla debian just fine)
but the consumer would spend more
No, certain consumers would pay more. The reason I don't want to pay for your cable is the same as the reason why I don't want to pay for your health care, welfare, and social security.