No, it's not the same, or even very confusing, because the differences are mostly binary. The Mac lineup in the mid-90s was indeed a mess. The models were randomly arranged and it was like "if you want the sunroof, you have to get the leather seats" with cars. Now, all the products are just the answer to a few questions:
Laptop: Super-thin, or powerful? Air: 11" or 13"? Pro: 13" or 15"? Retina or not? And then the typical speed/RAM/HD options.
iPad: they don't really expect people to buy the iPad 2. It's there for educational buyers, or the small handful of people who want a cheap 10" iPad. They aren't on the main iPad page, only on the "compare" page and in the store. (I don't even know if they actually have iPad 2s sitting out in the retail stores.)
Inventory of iPads that are, as of today, "old", will be cleared out quickly and never spoken of again. That leaves: 8" or 10"? Retina or not? 16/32/64 GB? 3G or WiFi-only? Four yes/no questions, the answer to each of which is pretty simple for most people, and in every case, "more costs more". Few people are so budget-constrained AND with such strong needs that they're really agonizing over "I want this capacity, but then I can't afford 3G..."
Phones: You want 2 tiers, Apple wants 3. For a while they had 2, at $199 and $99; now they have 3, at $199, $99, and $0. Not THAT confusing. The choices are: free and black, $99 fast and colorful and bigger screen, or $199, staid colors, and super powerful. Beyond that, you pick your carrier (duh) and capacity (if you're getting a non-$0 phone.)
Google isn't a big hardware maker. Neither is Amazon. It makes sense that they'd keep their lineups simple. Apple, on the other hand, makes all their money on hardware (note the free OS upgrade and free productivity apps, etc.) so naturally they want to appeal to as many people as possible, and give you the option to spend as much as you want.:-)
Been doing IT-ish stuff, up to and including moderate intranet app development, for 15 years. It's just the kind of mind I have: methodical, technical, but I didn't have the desire to get a CS degree. (Besides, do you need STEM to tell people to reboot so they can print?)
It's a ridiculously complicated system. (Scroll down to the graphic.) Figure out a way to release it in stages. Step 1, you can create an account and log in and read what the system will someday be. Step 2, make sure it's getting to all the right info from all the right places. Etc...
> "easier for non-programmers to build applications"
Yeah. Excuse me while I go punch the person who built this SharePoint list and made a column called 'group' and set its type to 'text' instead of 'number' so I can't sort it correctly. And set 'owner name' to 'long text' so it can't be sorted at all.:-|
> The microwave oven took 15 years to go from > proof of concept to an affordable counter > appliance. and another 10 years for decent > ideas on how to use it practically.
It didn't take that long. My parents were using our microwave to reheat coffee since the day they brought it home. (30 years later, that's still its #1 use.)
Oh please. It isn't *that* hard to make. Imagine a connector with 4 pins, doubled, viewed from above: 1 2 3 4 4 3 2 1 You run a wire up, split it, then join the two 1s. Another wire goes up, splits, and joins the 2s. Etc.
"Twice as many failure points" -- LOLOL. We're creating REDUNDANCY here. That's a GOOD thing. If one of the 4 pins in your USB connector breaks, you're fucked. If one of the 4 wires in a connector like I describe breaks, you put a dot with a marker on that side and remember that this connector only works one way now.
The difference in PCB printing and other costs are marginal. You can buy a variety of more complicated cables from monoprice for $3 each -- these things literally cost pennies, or a dollar or so, in quantity. And the OEM only cares about shipping a cable with a $300 device, or selling individually for $20. Let the commodity cable companies go after the low-end.
I'm not saying Apple's Lightning design is perfect but there's no reason not to make cables reversible. You're talking about something that gets used literally daily by hundreds of millions of people around the world. If automakers can afford to make keys that go both ways, electronics companies can make reversible cables. Design is all about compromise, but making a two-way connector isn't *that* big of a deal.
So despite the fact that Apple COULD have done this already and hasn't, and the fact that they've said repeatedly that they don't think it's a good idea (google "toasterfridge"), and the fact that they're currently hugely successful in NOT doing so... all these things added up and you think they ARE going to follow the "trail of failures" of merged OSs blazed by Ubuntu and MS? Nope, I just don't see that happening.
Someday in the future, CEOs won't be allowed to talk about other companies and celebrities won't be allowed to talk about... anything.
> For a 55" screen - the reason is clear - if you're sitting fairly close > to it - the edges are noticably further away from you.
Yeah, but we're used to seeing flat rectangles from far away. Does it EVER bother you that the edges of the screen appear to be a slightly different height than the height at the center? I'm sitting 20" away from my 30" screen at work and I don't even notice it. Does it ever bother you when you're at your friend's house, watching their TV from a non-ideal seat, and the whole thing is slightly trapazoid-ish? Your brain takes care of it for you. It knows it should be a rectangle so you perceive it as a rectangle.
If you're sitting so close that the edge distance matters, then the screen would take up too many degrees of your field of view and you wouldn't be able to focus on the whole thing at once anyway, so what's the point? Oh yeah, and no matter where you sit, you'll see curvature in the image. So, this would actually be worse under most circumstances.
As far as I can tell, it's a problem in search of a solution. (Or, something that just looks neat.) Some old theaters had curved movie screens, but that was so it could be evenly lit by a projector, which does not apply here.
Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Orange, Calif., told FoxNews.com a human brain model could have "unimaginable" implications for medicine...
Maybe the new brain will be able to imagine the implications.:-)
Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need...
Oh good, so AI is just 10 years away! -- as it's been for the last 50 years or so.
Not.
Going.
To.
Happen.
Seriously, how is this different from all the other AI research programs that have been done so far?
I've been running a public-facing web server at home for over 10 years. I use DynDNS (I joined right after they were founded; so for a small 'donation' (as it was at the time) I got lifetime service.:D ) and I've used it with different ISPs, and static and dynamic IPs. Name-wise, everything works great.
Bandwidth-wise, I used to have 1.5M down/256k up and it was fine. Not blazing fast or tons of capacity, but for "a couple dozen mails a day, a dozen or so web site visitors a day" even that was plenty. I used to have an image that was in the top 5 matches on images.yahoo.com for 'ac cobra wallapaper' and I sometimes got hundreds of hits a day -- no problem at all. A dozen hits per MINUTE is only one every 5 seconds so ANY web host should be able to handle that easily. I currently have a moderately-priced 18M down/1.5M up fiber-to-the-curb service. (AT&T in Florida.)
The single biggest drawback with home hosting is the possibility of running afoul of your ISP's terms of service. Two big upsides: basically infinite storage (I can watch every single ripped movie or TV show that I own at any time, from anywhere, on any device, for free, because I have a symlink in Apache leading to my media folders) and fast transfers when you're at home to upload new content -- I can drag 2 GB of photos from my CF card right into my gallery web app and the bottleneck is the speed of my card reader.
Uptime: I trust my computer as much as any. If it breaks, it's faster & easier to fix when it's in my closet than when it's colocated somewhere. If it's a real "cloud" place... hell, even Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have had notable outages. (And when THEY go down, you are 100% SOL until THEY fix it. Which they want to do, fast, because they have so many customers, but because they're so huge and complex, sometimes the downtime is significant, despite all their resources.)
Power: I've got a UPS. Electricity is pretty reliable where I live. Since my home phone is now digital, my telco sent me a dedicated UPS for the router ("modem") because I'm no longer using POTS with its magical self-powering capabilities.
The $350 you spend each year would pay for a new Linux box or used Mac mini... every single year. Since I'd pay for my Internet service no matter what, and run it off a Mac mini that's always on anyway, I basically get a hosted website* with infinite storage and "enough" bandwidth for nothing more than the cost of the domains, and electricity. (Which on a Mini is practically like a night-light.)
A guy walks into a pizza shop at lunchtime and asks for a personal pizza. The shop is new and wants to make people happy so the guy behind the counter asks "Do you want us to cut that into 4 slices or 6?" The customer thinks for a second and says "Better make it four. I'm not sure I could eat six."
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not the same, or even very confusing, because the differences are mostly binary. The Mac lineup in the mid-90s was indeed a mess. The models were randomly arranged and it was like "if you want the sunroof, you have to get the leather seats" with cars. Now, all the products are just the answer to a few questions:
Laptop: Super-thin, or powerful? Air: 11" or 13"? Pro: 13" or 15"? Retina or not? And then the typical speed/RAM/HD options.
iPad: they don't really expect people to buy the iPad 2. It's there for educational buyers, or the small handful of people who want a cheap 10" iPad. They aren't on the main iPad page, only on the "compare" page and in the store. (I don't even know if they actually have iPad 2s sitting out in the retail stores.)
Inventory of iPads that are, as of today, "old", will be cleared out quickly and never spoken of again. That leaves: 8" or 10"? Retina or not? 16/32/64 GB? 3G or WiFi-only? Four yes/no questions, the answer to each of which is pretty simple for most people, and in every case, "more costs more". Few people are so budget-constrained AND with such strong needs that they're really agonizing over "I want this capacity, but then I can't afford 3G..."
Phones: You want 2 tiers, Apple wants 3. For a while they had 2, at $199 and $99; now they have 3, at $199, $99, and $0. Not THAT confusing. The choices are: free and black, $99 fast and colorful and bigger screen, or $199, staid colors, and super powerful. Beyond that, you pick your carrier (duh) and capacity (if you're getting a non-$0 phone.)
Google isn't a big hardware maker. Neither is Amazon. It makes sense that they'd keep their lineups simple. Apple, on the other hand, makes all their money on hardware (note the free OS upgrade and free productivity apps, etc.) so naturally they want to appeal to as many people as possible, and give you the option to spend as much as you want. :-)
So you're saying "Everything in moderation"? Gee, let me write that down somewhere...
Chewing up all your CPU.
(Yes, this post is a joke. It's an (in)famous old article from everyone's favorite tech writer -- who was, in fact, being serious.)
Been doing IT-ish stuff, up to and including moderate intranet app development, for 15 years. It's just the kind of mind I have: methodical, technical, but I didn't have the desire to get a CS degree. (Besides, do you need STEM to tell people to reboot so they can print?)
It's a ridiculously complicated system. (Scroll down to the graphic.) Figure out a way to release it in stages. Step 1, you can create an account and log in and read what the system will someday be. Step 2, make sure it's getting to all the right info from all the right places. Etc...
> "easier for non-programmers to build applications"
Yeah. Excuse me while I go punch the person who built this SharePoint list and made a column called 'group' and set its type to 'text' instead of 'number' so I can't sort it correctly. And set 'owner name' to 'long text' so it can't be sorted at all. :-|
Yes, moar like this, please.
... results.`date +%s`.txt
Or do something to generate a GUID if you're concerned that multiple people will ship reports to this box in the same second.
> The microwave oven took 15 years to go from
> proof of concept to an affordable counter
> appliance. and another 10 years for decent
> ideas on how to use it practically.
It didn't take that long. My parents were using our microwave to reheat coffee since the day they brought it home. (30 years later, that's still its #1 use.)
Oh please. It isn't *that* hard to make. Imagine a connector with 4 pins, doubled, viewed from above:
1 2 3 4
4 3 2 1
You run a wire up, split it, then join the two 1s. Another wire goes up, splits, and joins the 2s. Etc.
"Twice as many failure points" -- LOLOL. We're creating REDUNDANCY here. That's a GOOD thing. If one of the 4 pins in your USB connector breaks, you're fucked. If one of the 4 wires in a connector like I describe breaks, you put a dot with a marker on that side and remember that this connector only works one way now.
The difference in PCB printing and other costs are marginal. You can buy a variety of more complicated cables from monoprice for $3 each -- these things literally cost pennies, or a dollar or so, in quantity. And the OEM only cares about shipping a cable with a $300 device, or selling individually for $20. Let the commodity cable companies go after the low-end.
I'm not saying Apple's Lightning design is perfect but there's no reason not to make cables reversible. You're talking about something that gets used literally daily by hundreds of millions of people around the world. If automakers can afford to make keys that go both ways, electronics companies can make reversible cables. Design is all about compromise, but making a two-way connector isn't *that* big of a deal.
"Creative directory"? Nice.
I dream of the day that I see a DICE listing that says "popular social news site seeks literate editor..."
So despite the fact that Apple COULD have done this already and hasn't, and the fact that they've said repeatedly that they don't think it's a good idea (google "toasterfridge"), and the fact that they're currently hugely successful in NOT doing so... all these things added up and you think they ARE going to follow the "trail of failures" of merged OSs blazed by Ubuntu and MS? Nope, I just don't see that happening.
Someday in the future, CEOs won't be allowed to talk about other companies and celebrities won't be allowed to talk about... anything.
1) It's only about 25,000 more pixels. So 2.5 "tens of thousands" more.
2) I said the MacBook had more VERTICAL pixels. I.e., height. 800 > 768.
> The C720 Chromebook has an 11.6-inch anti-glare
> widescreen, with a 1,366-by-768 resolution.
So it's like the 1024x768 Compaq laptop I had 15 years ago, but with 342 more pixels of width? Progress!
Dear laptop makers: moar pixels, please. Even my original 13" MacBook from 2006 ago had more vertical pixels. (1280x800)
> it kills me to put a $50 GeForce card with a heatsink
> and fan in a normally headless machine!
Then take off the heatsink and fan, duh. :-)
> For a 55" screen - the reason is clear - if you're sitting fairly close
> to it - the edges are noticably further away from you.
Yeah, but we're used to seeing flat rectangles from far away. Does it EVER bother you that the edges of the screen appear to be a slightly different height than the height at the center? I'm sitting 20" away from my 30" screen at work and I don't even notice it. Does it ever bother you when you're at your friend's house, watching their TV from a non-ideal seat, and the whole thing is slightly trapazoid-ish? Your brain takes care of it for you. It knows it should be a rectangle so you perceive it as a rectangle.
If you're sitting so close that the edge distance matters, then the screen would take up too many degrees of your field of view and you wouldn't be able to focus on the whole thing at once anyway, so what's the point? Oh yeah, and no matter where you sit, you'll see curvature in the image. So, this would actually be worse under most circumstances.
As far as I can tell, it's a problem in search of a solution. (Or, something that just looks neat.) Some old theaters had curved movie screens, but that was so it could be evenly lit by a projector, which does not apply here.
"Why are they charging for it in the first place?"
Duh: because they can.
This isn't even Econ 101. This is stuff everyone knows before they even enroll in an Econ class.
... playing just for the middlemen.
> /. does this far too often and I hope to see better in the future
Don't hold your breath. :-)
Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Orange, Calif., told FoxNews.com a human brain model could have "unimaginable" implications for medicine...
Maybe the new brain will be able to imagine the implications. :-)
Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need...
Oh good, so AI is just 10 years away! -- as it's been for the last 50 years or so.
Not.
Going.
To.
Happen.
Seriously, how is this different from all the other AI research programs that have been done so far?
I've been running a public-facing web server at home for over 10 years. I use DynDNS (I joined right after they were founded; so for a small 'donation' (as it was at the time) I got lifetime service. :D ) and I've used it with different ISPs, and static and dynamic IPs. Name-wise, everything works great.
Bandwidth-wise, I used to have 1.5M down/256k up and it was fine. Not blazing fast or tons of capacity, but for "a couple dozen mails a day, a dozen or so web site visitors a day" even that was plenty. I used to have an image that was in the top 5 matches on images.yahoo.com for 'ac cobra wallapaper' and I sometimes got hundreds of hits a day -- no problem at all. A dozen hits per MINUTE is only one every 5 seconds so ANY web host should be able to handle that easily. I currently have a moderately-priced 18M down/1.5M up fiber-to-the-curb service. (AT&T in Florida.)
The single biggest drawback with home hosting is the possibility of running afoul of your ISP's terms of service. Two big upsides: basically infinite storage (I can watch every single ripped movie or TV show that I own at any time, from anywhere, on any device, for free, because I have a symlink in Apache leading to my media folders) and fast transfers when you're at home to upload new content -- I can drag 2 GB of photos from my CF card right into my gallery web app and the bottleneck is the speed of my card reader.
Uptime: I trust my computer as much as any. If it breaks, it's faster & easier to fix when it's in my closet than when it's colocated somewhere. If it's a real "cloud" place... hell, even Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have had notable outages. (And when THEY go down, you are 100% SOL until THEY fix it. Which they want to do, fast, because they have so many customers, but because they're so huge and complex, sometimes the downtime is significant, despite all their resources.)
Power: I've got a UPS. Electricity is pretty reliable where I live. Since my home phone is now digital, my telco sent me a dedicated UPS for the router ("modem") because I'm no longer using POTS with its magical self-powering capabilities.
The $350 you spend each year would pay for a new Linux box or used Mac mini... every single year. Since I'd pay for my Internet service no matter what, and run it off a Mac mini that's always on anyway, I basically get a hosted website* with infinite storage and "enough" bandwidth for nothing more than the cost of the domains, and electricity. (Which on a Mini is practically like a night-light.)
* multiple domains, actually.
> Start paying them like peons and most of the candidates will be whackos.
And that would be worse than what we currently have because... ?
(Only half-kidding. :-) )
> The other common method of averaging, the mode, is
> ridiculous in this context and need not be considered.
Au contraire -- the mode (most common value) is EXACTLY what we should use: because it'd be minimum wage! :-)
A guy walks into a pizza shop at lunchtime and asks for a personal pizza. The shop is new and wants to make people happy so the guy behind the counter asks "Do you want us to cut that into 4 slices or 6?" The customer thinks for a second and says "Better make it four. I'm not sure I could eat six."
He'd still be alive if Obamacare had started sooner!