You're right - I made the assumption that Microsoft doing exactly the same thing Apple in this situation would negate Apple's advantage. That might not be true.
Why it took several weeks to get through that section: because he went through several weeks describing various methods people use - preconditions, postconditions, listing required input variables, listing variables which are modified destructively, listing variables only scoped within a function, changelogs in comments, et cetera.
Why I didn't get it right on the first assignment: Because after going through all that, he then proceeded to grade us using some private scheme for what was acceptable and what wasn't that very few people in the class managed to grok immediately.
Why I didn't get it right on the second, third, fourth, or fifth assignments: because he returned the first assignment to us immediately after we turned in the fifth one. Which I noted in my original post.
Once my friend and I realized that he was just reading the textbook, we started leaving fifteen minutes into the class, just to make sure we weren't missing anything. Once he complained about that being "rude", we started alternating, bringing other work to do in class, or just not showing up. Can't say it made a lick of difference.
Side note: on top of all that, it was a 200 level class on Data Structures, and the prof spent the first several weeks of class telling us how to comment our code. He returned the first of five assignments we'd turned in on the last day of class, at which point I realized that every project I'd done in the class had been "miscommented." "You know," I told him, "it would have been really useful to know you didn't want me to comment them this way before we had to turn the second, third, fourth, and fifth projects."
Plus, Mac people displace their hatred of Windows onto the hardware.
I don't think that's actually the norm, maybe your girlfriend does it. Many of us (myself included) are 100% all about the superior software. Sure, they manage to make hardware that looks pretty slick and fits in nice small places, which is great and all, but I honestly don't have any clue whether there's similar PC hardware available.
It's not something you'll find among Mac geeks, just among Mac zealots - who, generally speaking, are a lot less technically savvy then the geeks.
Anecdote: when Apple announced the switch to Intel hardware, someone in a Mac group I read immediately had a conniption and launched into an angry rant about how now, Macs would be vulnerable to the same viruses as Windows machines. He wasn't talking about Boot Camp or Parallels, either - he seriously thought that Windows native viruses were going to be reproduced in Mac OS X.
(To be fair, he was immediately hit with a flurry of "not quites," so I have no idea how widespread this kind of thing is.)
That's a good point, but that's precisely the reason that non-compete complaints that go to a judge generally are decided on the behalf of the little guy. A rarity in modern law.
That's sort of my point - the absolute worst thing you can say about the AAC format is that it's not quite as bad as mp3 in terms of restrictions. That's a pretty low bar.
Very clever on Apple's part. Since it is still in the AAC format, it acts as a "soft lockin". Yes, savvy users (./ readers, for example) can convert the files to MP3, albeit at the loss of fidelity in the lossy-to-lossy conversion process. But most users won't, so they will still be locked into the Ipod ecology.
From the format's wiki entry:
In contrast with the MP3 format, which requires royalty payments on distributed content, no licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format. [3] This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format for distributing content, particularly streaming content (such as Internet radio).
However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs. [4] It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FAAC and FAAD are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement....
* Microsoft Zune: Microsoft's Zune portable media player supports AAC among other audio and video formats.
* SanDisk Sansa e200R: The new Rhapsody-branded SanDisk Sansa e200R series contains updated firmware allowing for support and playback of MP4, M4A, and RealAudio, using the AAC codec.
* Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP): The PSP has had support for MP4 AAC files since the version 2.0 firmware update (released August 2005), but initially for files with a.mp4 extension only, meaning.m4a files needed to be renamed. This was fixed in the 2.7 firmware update.
* Sony Walkman (Walkman): The Walkman S series of MP3 players can use AAC encoded files. Older series may be able to add support with a firmware update.
* Sony Ericsson phones such as the P990, K800, and the Walkman-branded W series music phones such as the W950 and the W810 support MP4 files with audio encoded using AAC-LC, HE-AAC v1 and HE-AAC v2.
* Palm OS PDAs: Many Palm OS based PDAs and smartphones can play AAC and HE-AAC with the 3rd party software Pocket Tunes. Version 4.0, released in December 2006, added support for native AAC and HE-AAC files. The AAC codec for TCPMP, a popular video player, was withdrawn after version 0.66 due to patent issues, but can still be downloaded from sites other than corecodec.org. BetaPlayer, the commercial follow-on to TCPMP, will presumably include AAC support.
* Nokia Nseries multimedia phones: also support AAC format....
That lock-in is softer than a pair of fur-lined handcuffs. Probably about as easy to escape, too.
And how did Giuliani repay Bratton for his hard work? By asking for his resignation and hiring Bernard Kerik, a personal friend with ties to the mafia, to replace him.
You're going to be hearing about this a lot more if Giuliani presses ahead with his presidential campaign.
Ha! You know, I suspected that was the case, but when I did a "mount" command it listed all the partitions like I'm accustomed to seeing them in Solaris, so I wasn't sure. Thanks for clearing that up.:)
I suspect that they mean either that they have an internal deadline and aren't sharing it, or that it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to happen now and all that's left are the specific dates.
I'm no fan of Dell's, but I would be very surprised if something didn't come from this. Maybe before summer, even.
VI3 is actually a suite of products. At the heart is VMware ESX Server, which is actually an operating system in its own right: it runs "on the metal," without having Windows or Linux installed already on the system. It also has a service console operating system which looks suspiciously like a *NIX style operating system, so you can SSH directly to the system, cd into your/vmfs directory and, say, scp disk files over the network. If you wanted to.
However, as a pretty damn safe rule of thumb, no system is going to run faster on equivalent hardware after being virtualized. In a prior job where I was often asked to provide development/test systems, I got phone calls from a lot of people who were bitten hard by the virtualization bug. Whenever someone brought up any issue having to do with infrastructure, no matter how odd or off the wall, they wanted to push virtualization as a solution. I had to explain to them that if your problem is that a web server is slow, the answer isn't to install VMWare server on it, set up two host operating systems, and say, "There! Now I have two web servers." You'd be surprised how pervasive that sort of thinking is, even among people who should patently know better.
Another useful guideline: various types of services are impacted differently by being virtualized. Generally, the best candidates for virtualization are ones that spend a lot of time idle. This is actually more common than you might think - people need a server set up for something, can't put it on a pre-existing system for security/compatibility reasons, so they go out and buy a new system which is ten times more powerful than they need. You can put a lot of these kinds of systems on a single, reasonably powerful ESX server. On the other hand, systems that heavily tax available hardware, especially I/O, are usually much harder to deal with.
Reread my post. The pricing I cited was for an iPhone with a 2 year contract from Cingular. Apple has stated that the phone won't be available at all without a contract, although that may be gamesmanship on their part.
Will it be possible to buy the iPhone without a Cingular contract? Cingular said no, but a tipster says yes, and it will be crazy expensive:
As a employee of a company I cannot mention but that sells the majority of cingular phones that are sold in this country. I can tell this to you in hopes of you passing it on to all my die hard mac loving brothers. The iPhone will be available without a contract, that is if it comes to us via cingular. We will not have a product with at $$$ price tag that people are willing to outright buy on our shelves just sit on those shelves just because of "contracts". I'm not saying it won't be f&#*ing expensive but if it comes here it will be available. If not publicly at least in practice.
So any pricing you've heard for the iPhone is the pricing for the phone with contract, because no one has gone on record as saying that it will even be available at all without one.
I haven't bother checking on pricing for a 4 gig upgrade to the Samsung phone, but I'll stand by my statement that the closest comparison between the two phones makes the iPhone three times more expensive.
rpbird, I went and watched The Prestige this weekend after you mentioned it in your post. Much, much better than I expected.
Although: jebus, has there ever been a film where more people have had to fake various accents? Hugh Jackman had to pretend to be American, Christian Bale to be British, and David Bowie to be Russian.
Cuaron and James aren't the only ones who shy away from the title. Even hacktastic authors like Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman don't like the term science-fiction. In their introduction to the "Star of the Guardians" series (if you haven't read it? Don't.) Weis used the term to distinguish their books - which took place in space but only peripherally involved science - from books like, say, those by Greg Bear or David Brin.
Of course, regular folks like you and me would call the one variety of books "science fiction," or maybe "space opera" (or, if you've read them, "bad"), and the other books "hard sci-fi." But if you're inherently ashamed of the genre you're exploring, I suppose such a distinction isn't sufficient.
I've talked to three people who are either certified on this product or work for the manufacturer. I got three different answers with little in the way of explanation.
Then I have two words for you: "support ticket."
Open a ticket with their tech support. Tell them about the diagnostic steps you've taken. If possible, get someone to come out and examine the box or do maintenance on it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
And of course, as a side effect they'll probably wind up with a lovely distributed system for solving captcha. ;)
You're right - I made the assumption that Microsoft doing exactly the same thing Apple in this situation would negate Apple's advantage. That might not be true.
Unless, of course, Microsoft also offers DRM free WMA files in its Zune Marketplace.
But of course, that could never happen, right?
Why it took several weeks to get through that section: because he went through several weeks describing various methods people use - preconditions, postconditions, listing required input variables, listing variables which are modified destructively, listing variables only scoped within a function, changelogs in comments, et cetera.
Why I didn't get it right on the first assignment: Because after going through all that, he then proceeded to grade us using some private scheme for what was acceptable and what wasn't that very few people in the class managed to grok immediately.
Why I didn't get it right on the second, third, fourth, or fifth assignments: because he returned the first assignment to us immediately after we turned in the fifth one. Which I noted in my original post.
Likewise. God, that prof was horrible.
Once my friend and I realized that he was just reading the textbook, we started leaving fifteen minutes into the class, just to make sure we weren't missing anything. Once he complained about that being "rude", we started alternating, bringing other work to do in class, or just not showing up. Can't say it made a lick of difference.
Side note: on top of all that, it was a 200 level class on Data Structures, and the prof spent the first several weeks of class telling us how to comment our code. He returned the first of five assignments we'd turned in on the last day of class, at which point I realized that every project I'd done in the class had been "miscommented." "You know," I told him, "it would have been really useful to know you didn't want me to comment them this way before we had to turn the second, third, fourth, and fifth projects."
He shrugged. "Sorry." Ass.
(Sorry. Venting complete.)
It's not something you'll find among Mac geeks, just among Mac zealots - who, generally speaking, are a lot less technically savvy then the geeks.
Anecdote: when Apple announced the switch to Intel hardware, someone in a Mac group I read immediately had a conniption and launched into an angry rant about how now, Macs would be vulnerable to the same viruses as Windows machines. He wasn't talking about Boot Camp or Parallels, either - he seriously thought that Windows native viruses were going to be reproduced in Mac OS X.
(To be fair, he was immediately hit with a flurry of "not quites," so I have no idea how widespread this kind of thing is.)
That's a good point, but that's precisely the reason that non-compete complaints that go to a judge generally are decided on the behalf of the little guy. A rarity in modern law.
(IANAL)
That's sort of my point - the absolute worst thing you can say about the AAC format is that it's not quite as bad as mp3 in terms of restrictions. That's a pretty low bar.
Apologies: the above blockquote should have carried the following reference.
g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin
From the format's wiki entry:
That lock-in is softer than a pair of fur-lined handcuffs. Probably about as easy to escape, too.
Indeed, we're hearing more about it now.
And here I thought it had something to do with Quatloos...
Ha! You know, I suspected that was the case, but when I did a "mount" command it listed all the partitions like I'm accustomed to seeing them in Solaris, so I wasn't sure. Thanks for clearing that up. :)
I suspect that they mean either that they have an internal deadline and aren't sharing it, or that it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to happen now and all that's left are the specific dates.
I'm no fan of Dell's, but I would be very surprised if something didn't come from this. Maybe before summer, even.
Yes: it performs much, much better.
/vmfs directory and, say, scp disk files over the network. If you wanted to.
VI3 is actually a suite of products. At the heart is VMware ESX Server, which is actually an operating system in its own right: it runs "on the metal," without having Windows or Linux installed already on the system. It also has a service console operating system which looks suspiciously like a *NIX style operating system, so you can SSH directly to the system, cd into your
However, as a pretty damn safe rule of thumb, no system is going to run faster on equivalent hardware after being virtualized. In a prior job where I was often asked to provide development/test systems, I got phone calls from a lot of people who were bitten hard by the virtualization bug. Whenever someone brought up any issue having to do with infrastructure, no matter how odd or off the wall, they wanted to push virtualization as a solution. I had to explain to them that if your problem is that a web server is slow, the answer isn't to install VMWare server on it, set up two host operating systems, and say, "There! Now I have two web servers." You'd be surprised how pervasive that sort of thinking is, even among people who should patently know better.
Another useful guideline: various types of services are impacted differently by being virtualized. Generally, the best candidates for virtualization are ones that spend a lot of time idle. This is actually more common than you might think - people need a server set up for something, can't put it on a pre-existing system for security/compatibility reasons, so they go out and buy a new system which is ten times more powerful than they need. You can put a lot of these kinds of systems on a single, reasonably powerful ESX server. On the other hand, systems that heavily tax available hardware, especially I/O, are usually much harder to deal with.
Courtesy of The Consumerist:
So any pricing you've heard for the iPhone is the pricing for the phone with contract, because no one has gone on record as saying that it will even be available at all without one.
I haven't bother checking on pricing for a 4 gig upgrade to the Samsung phone, but I'll stand by my statement that the closest comparison between the two phones makes the iPhone three times more expensive.
It's only $150 with contract, which is how I assume most people will wind up buying the phone.
The iPhone is listed as being $499 or $599, depending on the model. The iPhone will only be available bundled with a contract.
So depending on which model iPhone you compare it with, it's either one-third or one-quarter the price.
"Just" $200 more?
Let me rewrite that sentence for you...
There.
Pshaw. If there are too many syllables, surely you're just not singing them fast enough.
Do some crank, try again, and call me back with your results.
...and David Bowie to be Russian.
:)
Oops. That should be, Austrian/Croatian. Sorry.
rpbird, I went and watched The Prestige this weekend after you mentioned it in your post. Much, much better than I expected.
Although: jebus, has there ever been a film where more people have had to fake various accents? Hugh Jackman had to pretend to be American, Christian Bale to be British, and David Bowie to be Russian.
(Sung to the tune of "Bad Reputation", by Freedy Johnston)
I know, I've got a bad reputation:
and it isn't just W32/Delbot.
If I could only keep this damn malware
out of my inbox.
I could have had a normal conversation,
if it wasn't for this firewall.
If it deletes zip files with passwords,
then they're worth fuck-all.
Suddenly, my mail gateway is hosed,
malware is being
installed by the truckload,
keeps breaking down.
Can you help me now? Can you help me now?
Cuaron and James aren't the only ones who shy away from the title. Even hacktastic authors like Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman don't like the term science-fiction. In their introduction to the "Star of the Guardians" series (if you haven't read it? Don't.) Weis used the term to distinguish their books - which took place in space but only peripherally involved science - from books like, say, those by Greg Bear or David Brin.
Of course, regular folks like you and me would call the one variety of books "science fiction," or maybe "space opera" (or, if you've read them, "bad"), and the other books "hard sci-fi." But if you're inherently ashamed of the genre you're exploring, I suppose such a distinction isn't sufficient.
Bah, I say.
Do a google search for "furries." I'd link you up myself, but no way I'm doing that from work.
Then I have two words for you: "support ticket."
Open a ticket with their tech support. Tell them about the diagnostic steps you've taken. If possible, get someone to come out and examine the box or do maintenance on it for you.