Grapes from newly planted vines don't make good wine. It takes years for the plant to develop to the point where wine made from the grapes tastes good. Nowadays, people use old root-stocks, grafting new plants onto older roots, to speed up the process.
'Tis true. About 3 years before you get the first decent harvest. About 5 years until you can make wine that isn't a toxic hazard. About eight years before you start getting good harvests that will make potentially good wine.
Been growing grapes and making (mainly undrinkable) wine in CA for about 8 years now:-)
If you bother to go to the wine country of northern California, I suggest going through Sonoma rather than Napa. Napa has some good wines, but it's very touristy.
Agreed in general though even the Napa has some quieter, smaller wineries that are worth visiting. There are several hundred wineries in the Napa and they vary tremendously.
Sonoma has great wines and is fairly quiet, off the beaten path. One of my favorites is Rochioli, close to Hop Kiln, which is also good. Suggest taking along some food, get a bottle of Chardonnay and kick back, as most of these places have a little outdoor area you can relax at.
Hop Kiln is a great place to visit and picnic - wonderful old building - but the wines are mediocre. If you really want great Sonoma wines then travel a little further down the road to Davis Bynum for some of the best Pinot Noir on the planet.
I have no idea if Coppola invites visitors or has a tasting room.
Yes there is a large visitors center at Niebaum-Coppola. Its touristy, including the inevitable movie museum complete with Oscars, but still fun and the wines are good. They recently announced a plan to go upmarket, lower volume better quality. Given their history with their reserve blends and vintages, I suspect they could come up with sometiming exceptional. Time will tell.
Seriously though, growing wines in west Marin leaves me wondering about the quality of these wines (particularly a Chardonnay), but Coppola has produced some rather tasty wines including a scrumptious Merlots and a Claret or two, so I am inclined to believe there may be something of note.
Yes, but the Niebaum-Coppola wines are grown on the Rutherford Bench, which is generally considered the finest grape growing area of the Napa Valley. Fine wines have been cultivated there for over 100 years. He also has some very serious winemakers working for him.
West Marin though, as you note, hasn't exactly got an illustrious history of viticulture. That said you can grow some great wines in some unlikely spots in California, thanks to the excellent climate. One of my favorite wineries is Ridge whose main vineyards are on the ridge overlooking Silicon Valley.
I was dissapointed by The Da Vinci Code which I read last year. Brown is pretty much a hack writer and seems to be more interested in a whiz-bang plot than developing anything deeper or more interesting. His characters are flat and don't really develop - the hero of Da Vinci Code is Indiana Jones without the bravery. The research behind the book seems very much like a bunch of vaguely-related conspiracy theories that the author read about and decided to write a pot-boiler around.
For a much more interesting book that uses similar material to go a lot further, try Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Eco uses the background of holy grail consipracists to weave a tale rich in detailed historical research, amusing characters and that is layered with meaning. You get the what-is-going-to-happen plot and structural and metaphorical complexity. I suspect that Brown may have read Foucault's Pendulum before he wrote Da Vinci Code, because some of the similarities are noticeable.
Summary: Da Vinci Code is a fun enough airport novel. I enjoyed reading it but in the end didn't feel I'd gained anything for having read it.
Now if there were only a way to block certain Flash advertisements...
Agreed, and at the risk of Slashdotting a good guy's website, I'd highly recommend this flash blocker. I installed it a couple of weeks ago and now I don't have any more Flash ads. Its improved my web surfing immeasurably. The trouble with Flash ads is they (usually) have so much animation in them that they draw the attention from the text of the article I'm trying to read. Some sites are now so Flash-ad heavy they're unusuable. Flash Click-to-View is a wonderful tool that lets you view only the Flash content you want to see. Let's hope they incorporate it into the main Mozilla build soon.
I've often wondered why we don't see more books of this caliber hitting the market. It shouldn't be that hard to write good documentation, should it? What does it take?
Well, first the fact that there are so few good manuals should tell you something about how hard they are to write. Here are a few of the reasons its hard:
1) Most technical writers are writers first and technical people second. So they sometimes struggle to understand the complex technical subject matter they are trying to explain. BTW, David Pogue is a clear exception to this generalization.
2) Writing introductory manuals is particularly hard. By the time you are well-versed enough in the subject matter you are something of an expert. Its very difficult to remember which bits need explaining to someone who is not as expert as you are now.
3) The audience for manuals is large and varied. What is too complex and technical for one reader is too patronizing and long winded for the next. Its almost impossible to write something that's pitched at a suitable level for more than 2 readers.
4) Writing clear, concise, accurate English (or any other language) is hard. If it were easy there'd be many more well-written manuals.
5) No-one buys a product because the manual is good, so there really isn't a financial incentive for companies to hire those rare good technical writers.
Of course, some companies just don't try, which is abysmal. Sometimes you see excellent manuals. But most are just mediocre. I agree, a big "thank you" to the real artists like David Pogue who continue to provide excellent manuals and books.
Great, now we've Slashdotted the Second World War. Do you have any idea what we might have done to history? Doesn't anyone watch quality movies like Timeline anymore?
But remember that when Microsoft came up with Windows, it was actually a very innovative thing too - a Mac-like interface for you DOS machines!
Of course Windows 1.0 was not the first attempt to do this. Don't forget such wonders as IBM's TopView, Quarterdeck's Desq, Digital Research's GEM and a number of others. For a while in the early/mid 1980's there was a swirl of innovation and copying (not to mention a lawsuit or two) as people tried to bring the Xerox-invented GUI to desktop computers.
Re:Public funding of private research
on
Growing Up With Lucy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It may be that he hasn't spent the time and effort to put into words what he's been praticing and developing.
He doesn't have enough time to write a single academic paper, but has managed to "dash out" two books? That theory doesn't hold water, IMHO.
Being someone that sounds like an abstract sequential thinker, it's likely not far from the truth that he probably comes up with many ideas and designs and simply has no explanation for how they work.
He knows they do, but couldn't explain it without much more time spent on the explanation than the furthering of the design.
Genius with a touch of insanity, it's what great thinkers are made of.
No, perhaps some "great thinkers" are like that, but many are perfectly sane people who are smart and interested enough in a specific goal to try to solve a problem. Others might be driven by greed, love, a gun pointed at them. Who knows? Your vague generalisation covers up the variety and complexity of human intelligence and don't help anyone.
I checked out his website here. He seems to spend a lot of time explaining (at a shallow level) what he does if he's really someone who can explain it. He seems to me more like someone who (believes he) has some great ideas but doesn't want to share them yet.
That's just fine, and I say a big "congrats" to him for being able to fund his own research. My point was to counter the reviewer's argument that this kind of private research should be publically funded. I don't see Steve Grand making that argument, by the way.
Public funding of private research
on
Growing Up With Lucy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...for the time being Steve is subsisting on the dregs of a NESTA (the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) grant to him as a 'Dreamtime Fellow' more on the artistic merits of his work than on its scientific promise. How weird is that?
Well, given:
He does not offer us his code to review and as yet has not produced any technical papers to satisfy the curiosity of the professional reader
Then I don't think its weird. Publishing technical papers on your work is a reasonable requirement for gaining public funding of scientific research. If the public is funding it, the public should have access to the work. Peer-review of published work, while not a perfect system, is a proper requisit for ensuring that claims made are substantiated and sustainable.
He's been working on this for at least 3 years, probably longer, and hasn't produced a single paper? I wouldn't fund him, and I'm glad that the government isn't either.
I heard some of these monasteries actually make money off brewing beer!
There is a great and long tradition of Trappist monastaries brewing beer. The Belgian trappist ales are some of the finest in existence. If you like your beer dark, rich and potent then there is nothing finer. The best known are the Chimay ales which are truly excellent, especially the chocolatey Trippel.
Goodness I think its time to leave work and find God at the bottom of a bottle...
They claim to own System V, but give no evidence regarding linux ownership.
They do indeed claim System V. They also claim that this ownership (in the form of copyright to the source code and design, I believe) automatically extends to all works derived in part or whole from System V.
Unless System V == Linux
This means that according to their claim, Linux in fact does not have to be the same as System V, it only has to be derived from it for them to have ownership of (part of) the Linux source code.
IANAL, but it seems to me that this claim of derivation is extremely tenuous. But copyright law does recognize the general notion of derived works, so its just possible that they are right about this. It will take a court - and probably several appeals courts - to decide this.
Even if they did establish that their copyright of System V gave them rights to derived works in the way they are claiming, I suspect they would also need to separately show that Linux was derived from System V in that way.
Again, their claim is not so much that specific blocks of code have been copied from their codebase into Linux, but that the general specifications and design (as well as code) of System V is present in Linux. If they are right about this then recoding specific infringing code may not be enough to satisfy the courts.
I suspect their case is deeply flawed, but it does seem at least based in a reading of the law.
Also, any recommendations for manufacturers that are good about making obscure replacement parts for their laptops available to the general public?
I have a Dell Inspiron laptop, the bezel started cracking about 18 months after I purchased it, and there were also cracks in the case. Dell replaced both free of charge. They also carry the bezel in the online store for a pretty reasonable amount.
Not everything about Dell is right, but replacing the plastic parts for free or reasonable cost? They were wonderful.
Ok, this is the thing I don't understand....and maybe someone can explain it to me. Why would I want a global economy?? From what I can see, it is beneficial to everyone EXCEPT the US. It seems to do nothing but deplete our jobs...standard of living, etc. What possible good can it do for us? It seemed to be better when we led production and innovation in most areas....
Since this is in the context of HP, let's talk about the computer industry. Labor is a significant part of the costs of computer goods. If you want to reduce the cost of producing computers a good way is to reduce the labor costs. One of the reasons why many computers are designed in the US but manufactured in Taiwan is that the Taiwanese manufacturers can produce the commodity parts of the systems cheaply, largely because of lower wage costs.
Similar argument for software, support services etc.: its cheaper to do them in India or Romania because wage costs are lower there and educational standards are high.
Outsourcing reduces the cost you pay for things. Want to pay $10,000 for your PC? Buy one built completely by US labor. Want to pay $1000 for a PC? Buy one built in Taiwan.
Of course wage costs aren't the only cost component, but they are a significant one and reducing them has a major benefit for US consumers.
Who are 'they'? My guess would be 'they who cannot count very well'. If this is not a mistake but a clever way to point out the fact that most projects take a lot longer to complete than originally intended, I bow to your superior wit and apologize.
No, its an old saw that's often heard amongst software engineers. The version you'll hear most commonly is "the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the remainng 10% takes the other 90%". It means that getting the basic functionality in place ("alpha") is a lot of work and most naive people assume that's most of the task of shipping a product. In fact, even once you've got the basic features coded, there's at least as much work left bug testing, polishing, documenting and generally preparing for release.
Not my phrase originally, I don't know where it comes from, but most every engineer worth her salt will have heard it.
So if most of the Classic Mac's functionality is based on Carbon, which is based on QuickTime, and QuickTime has been ported to Windows...
aaaannnd, most of the NextStep functionality was available to x86 early on, with the YellowBox environment as well as seen in Rhapsody and WebObjects...
aaaaannnd Darwin, the OSX xnu kernel and personalities on Mach run on x86...
We have pretty complete coverage of the state of the Mac on x86. Interesting. I suspect with QuickTime installed, the hardest thing about iTunes on Windows was getting the GUI right. Which really is hard.
Yes, this is indeed the case. However...
First you're missing some important components, for example the Quartz rendering layer and the Aqua UI components. Neither of these are at all trivial.
Second, even ignorning Quartz and Aqua, you now have a set of about 70% of the components you need to build a Mac OS X-like operating system on Intel. As they say, the first 70% of the work takes 90% of the time, the other 30% of the work takes the other 90% of the time. It gives you a head-start, sure but you still have an immense effort ahead of you.
Apple spent (very, very approximately) a team of 1,000 engineers for 3 years to get to Mac OS X 10.0, from about the starting point you describe. That's 3,000 engineer-years of effort to find. Panther is another 3,000 engineer-years beyond that. It could be done, but its not trivial.
That said, when I was at Apple we did builds of Mac OS X (the entire stack) for PowerPC and Intel. From colleagues still at Infinite Loop I understand they still do every build for both platforms. I don't believe that it is technical barriers that are stopping Mac OS X for Intel...
Why should it be modded down if it applies? The point of moderation is so people can switch to articles of 3 or higher and get good comments on an article. If the post is informative who cares who wrote it or when? When attribution is polite, I think modding down hurts things far worse. It's not as if they can collect Karma anymore.
What attribution? There was no attribution on this post. If the poster had said: "hey there's an interesting and relevant posting about this in another thread" and provided a link, I'd be grateful. Plagarising someone else's work is deceitful and self-aggrandizing. I for one don't value input from plagarists.
Besides in this case the plagarised post wasn't relevant to the article and therefore wasn't informative.
Carbon is based on the classic Mac APIs which go way back to 1984, while the Carbon API actually exists (and is available for calls) in MacOS 8.1 and higher via the CarbonLib classic extension.
Actually (if you care about all the historical details of Mac OS X's evolution) Carbon was originally based on the QuickTime library, which in turn was based on the classic Mac APIs. I was an engineer on the QuickTime team during the early Rhapsody days up through Mac OS X beta.
When Rhapsody (basically the NextStep OS) was being developed it quickly became obvious we needed to support classic Macintosh applications. QuickTime had already been ported to an early Rhapsody version, and it just so happened QuickTime already carried around an API that contained about 70% of the Mac OS functionality. This is how QuickTime runs on Windows and why porting Carbon/classic Mac apps to Windows is (relatively) painless if you know to call the QTW libraries. So Apple effectively had the start of Carbon on NextStep as a result of the QuickTime port. Rhapsody became Mac OS X, the QuickTime library support was spun out to its own team and became Carbon.
None of which really disagrees with your post, just a little more detail on the exact process.
KOffice comprises the customary litany of applications...
This posting is plagarism of the worst sort. Cut and paste in its entirety from: LinuxPlanet. Taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own without attribution is simply dishonest. It is not informative or insightful.
Just FYI, this guy's a troll. Check out his recent posts. Apparently he's also "in middle management at Honda". I highly doubt Apple are considering OpenRISC for the iPod.
Just like in various other occult groups (such as RPGers), some things they find...
To (mis-) quote the wonderful Princess Bride: "Occult. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Neither physicists nor RPGers as a group could reasonably described as occult. Indeed you'd be closer to the mark if you described physics as the opposite of occult...
Slashdot Mirror
Grapes from newly planted vines don't make good wine. It takes years for the plant to develop to the point where wine made from the grapes tastes good. Nowadays, people use old root-stocks, grafting new plants onto older roots, to speed up the process.
:-)
'Tis true. About 3 years before you get the first decent harvest. About 5 years until you can make wine that isn't a toxic hazard. About eight years before you start getting good harvests that will make potentially good wine.
Been growing grapes and making (mainly undrinkable) wine in CA for about 8 years now
If you bother to go to the wine country of northern California, I suggest going through Sonoma rather than Napa. Napa has some good wines, but it's very touristy.
Agreed in general though even the Napa has some quieter, smaller wineries that are worth visiting. There are several hundred wineries in the Napa and they vary tremendously.
Sonoma has great wines and is fairly quiet, off the beaten path. One of my favorites is Rochioli, close to Hop Kiln, which is also good. Suggest taking along some food, get a bottle of Chardonnay and kick back, as most of these places have a little outdoor area you can relax at.
Hop Kiln is a great place to visit and picnic - wonderful old building - but the wines are mediocre. If you really want great Sonoma wines then travel a little further down the road to Davis Bynum for some of the best Pinot Noir on the planet.
I have no idea if Coppola invites visitors or has a tasting room.
Yes there is a large visitors center at Niebaum-Coppola. Its touristy, including the inevitable movie museum complete with Oscars, but still fun and the wines are good. They recently announced a plan to go upmarket, lower volume better quality. Given their history with their reserve blends and vintages, I suspect they could come up with sometiming exceptional. Time will tell.
Seriously though, growing wines in west Marin leaves me wondering about the quality of these wines (particularly a Chardonnay), but Coppola has produced some rather tasty wines including a scrumptious Merlots and a Claret or two, so I am inclined to believe there may be something of note.
Yes, but the Niebaum-Coppola wines are grown on the Rutherford Bench, which is generally considered the finest grape growing area of the Napa Valley. Fine wines have been cultivated there for over 100 years. He also has some very serious winemakers working for him.
West Marin though, as you note, hasn't exactly got an illustrious history of viticulture. That said you can grow some great wines in some unlikely spots in California, thanks to the excellent climate. One of my favorite wineries is Ridge whose main vineyards are on the ridge overlooking Silicon Valley.
I was dissapointed by The Da Vinci Code which I read last year. Brown is pretty much a hack writer and seems to be more interested in a whiz-bang plot than developing anything deeper or more interesting. His characters are flat and don't really develop - the hero of Da Vinci Code is Indiana Jones without the bravery. The research behind the book seems very much like a bunch of vaguely-related conspiracy theories that the author read about and decided to write a pot-boiler around.
For a much more interesting book that uses similar material to go a lot further, try Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Eco uses the background of holy grail consipracists to weave a tale rich in detailed historical research, amusing characters and that is layered with meaning. You get the what-is-going-to-happen plot and structural and metaphorical complexity. I suspect that Brown may have read Foucault's Pendulum before he wrote Da Vinci Code, because some of the similarities are noticeable.
Summary: Da Vinci Code is a fun enough airport novel. I enjoyed reading it but in the end didn't feel I'd gained anything for having read it.
Free Tibet!
Free Tibet? Now that's a competition! None of this buy crappy Pepsi, win crappy Britney tune. Apparently this dude is giving away whole countries.
Where do I enter?
Handlebar mustache and a Ferrari laptop... This guy is obviously rolling in chicks!
That, sir, is not a handlebar moustache, these are handlebar moustaches. Look on these work, ye mighty, and despair.
Mind you, I agree that Rob must be absolutely up to his eyebrow in chicks.
Now if there were only a way to block certain Flash advertisements...
Agreed, and at the risk of Slashdotting a good guy's website, I'd highly recommend this flash blocker. I installed it a couple of weeks ago and now I don't have any more Flash ads. Its improved my web surfing immeasurably. The trouble with Flash ads is they (usually) have so much animation in them that they draw the attention from the text of the article I'm trying to read. Some sites are now so Flash-ad heavy they're unusuable. Flash Click-to-View is a wonderful tool that lets you view only the Flash content you want to see. Let's hope they incorporate it into the main Mozilla build soon.
I've often wondered why we don't see more books of this caliber hitting the market. It shouldn't be that hard to write good documentation, should it? What does it take?
Well, first the fact that there are so few good manuals should tell you something about how hard they are to write. Here are a few of the reasons its hard:
1) Most technical writers are writers first and technical people second. So they sometimes struggle to understand the complex technical subject matter they are trying to explain. BTW, David Pogue is a clear exception to this generalization.
2) Writing introductory manuals is particularly hard. By the time you are well-versed enough in the subject matter you are something of an expert. Its very difficult to remember which bits need explaining to someone who is not as expert as you are now.
3) The audience for manuals is large and varied. What is too complex and technical for one reader is too patronizing and long winded for the next. Its almost impossible to write something that's pitched at a suitable level for more than 2 readers.
4) Writing clear, concise, accurate English (or any other language) is hard. If it were easy there'd be many more well-written manuals.
5) No-one buys a product because the manual is good, so there really isn't a financial incentive for companies to hire those rare good technical writers.
Of course, some companies just don't try, which is abysmal. Sometimes you see excellent manuals. But most are just mediocre. I agree, a big "thank you" to the real artists like David Pogue who continue to provide excellent manuals and books.
Great, now we've Slashdotted the Second World War. Do you have any idea what we might have done to history? Doesn't anyone watch quality movies like Timeline anymore?
But remember that when Microsoft came up with Windows, it was actually a very innovative thing too - a Mac-like interface for you DOS machines!
Of course Windows 1.0 was not the first attempt to do this. Don't forget such wonders as IBM's TopView, Quarterdeck's Desq, Digital Research's GEM and a number of others. For a while in the early/mid 1980's there was a swirl of innovation and copying (not to mention a lawsuit or two) as people tried to bring the Xerox-invented GUI to desktop computers.
Actually his name is Steven P. Jobs. Just FYI.
It may be that he hasn't spent the time and effort to put into words what he's been praticing and developing.
He doesn't have enough time to write a single academic paper, but has managed to "dash out" two books? That theory doesn't hold water, IMHO.
Being someone that sounds like an abstract sequential thinker, it's likely not far from the truth that he probably comes up with many ideas and designs and simply has no explanation for how they work.
He knows they do, but couldn't explain it without much more time spent on the explanation than the furthering of the design.
Genius with a touch of insanity, it's what great thinkers are made of.
No, perhaps some "great thinkers" are like that, but many are perfectly sane people who are smart and interested enough in a specific goal to try to solve a problem. Others might be driven by greed, love, a gun pointed at them. Who knows? Your vague generalisation covers up the variety and complexity of human intelligence and don't help anyone.
I checked out his website here. He seems to spend a lot of time explaining (at a shallow level) what he does if he's really someone who can explain it. He seems to me more like someone who (believes he) has some great ideas but doesn't want to share them yet.
That's just fine, and I say a big "congrats" to him for being able to fund his own research. My point was to counter the reviewer's argument that this kind of private research should be publically funded. I don't see Steve Grand making that argument, by the way.
...for the time being Steve is subsisting on the dregs of a NESTA (the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) grant to him as a 'Dreamtime Fellow' more on the artistic merits of his work than on its scientific promise. How weird is that?
Well, given:
He does not offer us his code to review and as yet has not produced any technical papers to satisfy the curiosity of the professional reader
Then I don't think its weird. Publishing technical papers on your work is a reasonable requirement for gaining public funding of scientific research. If the public is funding it, the public should have access to the work. Peer-review of published work, while not a perfect system, is a proper requisit for ensuring that claims made are substantiated and sustainable.
He's been working on this for at least 3 years, probably longer, and hasn't produced a single paper? I wouldn't fund him, and I'm glad that the government isn't either.
I heard some of these monasteries actually make money off brewing beer!
There is a great and long tradition of Trappist monastaries brewing beer. The Belgian trappist ales are some of the finest in existence. If you like your beer dark, rich and potent then there is nothing finer. The best known are the Chimay ales which are truly excellent, especially the chocolatey Trippel.
Goodness I think its time to leave work and find God at the bottom of a bottle...
They claim to own System V, but give no evidence regarding linux ownership.
They do indeed claim System V. They also claim that this ownership (in the form of copyright to the source code and design, I believe) automatically extends to all works derived in part or whole from System V.
Unless System V == Linux
This means that according to their claim, Linux in fact does not have to be the same as System V, it only has to be derived from it for them to have ownership of (part of) the Linux source code.
IANAL, but it seems to me that this claim of derivation is extremely tenuous. But copyright law does recognize the general notion of derived works, so its just possible that they are right about this. It will take a court - and probably several appeals courts - to decide this.
Even if they did establish that their copyright of System V gave them rights to derived works in the way they are claiming, I suspect they would also need to separately show that Linux was derived from System V in that way.
Again, their claim is not so much that specific blocks of code have been copied from their codebase into Linux, but that the general specifications and design (as well as code) of System V is present in Linux. If they are right about this then recoding specific infringing code may not be enough to satisfy the courts.
I suspect their case is deeply flawed, but it does seem at least based in a reading of the law.
Also, any recommendations for manufacturers that are good about making obscure replacement parts for their laptops available to the general public?
I have a Dell Inspiron laptop, the bezel started cracking about 18 months after I purchased it, and there were also cracks in the case. Dell replaced both free of charge. They also carry the bezel in the online store for a pretty reasonable amount.
Not everything about Dell is right, but replacing the plastic parts for free or reasonable cost? They were wonderful.
Just one experience, of course.
Ok, this is the thing I don't understand....and maybe someone can explain it to me. Why would I want a global economy?? From what I can see, it is beneficial to everyone EXCEPT the US. It seems to do nothing but deplete our jobs...standard of living, etc. What possible good can it do for us? It seemed to be better when we led production and innovation in most areas....
Since this is in the context of HP, let's talk about the computer industry. Labor is a significant part of the costs of computer goods. If you want to reduce the cost of producing computers a good way is to reduce the labor costs. One of the reasons why many computers are designed in the US but manufactured in Taiwan is that the Taiwanese manufacturers can produce the commodity parts of the systems cheaply, largely because of lower wage costs.
Similar argument for software, support services etc.: its cheaper to do them in India or Romania because wage costs are lower there and educational standards are high.
Outsourcing reduces the cost you pay for things. Want to pay $10,000 for your PC? Buy one built completely by US labor. Want to pay $1000 for a PC? Buy one built in Taiwan.
Of course wage costs aren't the only cost component, but they are a significant one and reducing them has a major benefit for US consumers.
Who are 'they'? My guess would be 'they who cannot count very well'. If this is not a mistake but a clever way to point out the fact that most projects take a lot longer to complete than originally intended, I bow to your superior wit and apologize.
No, its an old saw that's often heard amongst software engineers. The version you'll hear most commonly is "the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the remainng 10% takes the other 90%". It means that getting the basic functionality in place ("alpha") is a lot of work and most naive people assume that's most of the task of shipping a product. In fact, even once you've got the basic features coded, there's at least as much work left bug testing, polishing, documenting and generally preparing for release.
Not my phrase originally, I don't know where it comes from, but most every engineer worth her salt will have heard it.
So if most of the Classic Mac's functionality is based on Carbon, which is based on QuickTime, and QuickTime has been ported to Windows...
aaaannnd, most of the NextStep functionality was available to x86 early on, with the YellowBox environment as well as seen in Rhapsody and WebObjects...
aaaaannnd Darwin, the OSX xnu kernel and personalities on Mach run on x86...
We have pretty complete coverage of the state of the Mac on x86. Interesting. I suspect with QuickTime installed, the hardest thing about iTunes on Windows was getting the GUI right. Which really is hard.
Yes, this is indeed the case. However...
First you're missing some important components, for example the Quartz rendering layer and the Aqua UI components. Neither of these are at all trivial.
Second, even ignorning Quartz and Aqua, you now have a set of about 70% of the components you need to build a Mac OS X-like operating system on Intel. As they say, the first 70% of the work takes 90% of the time, the other 30% of the work takes the other 90% of the time. It gives you a head-start, sure but you still have an immense effort ahead of you.
Apple spent (very, very approximately) a team of 1,000 engineers for 3 years to get to Mac OS X 10.0, from about the starting point you describe. That's 3,000 engineer-years of effort to find. Panther is another 3,000 engineer-years beyond that. It could be done, but its not trivial.
That said, when I was at Apple we did builds of Mac OS X (the entire stack) for PowerPC and Intel. From colleagues still at Infinite Loop I understand they still do every build for both platforms. I don't believe that it is technical barriers that are stopping Mac OS X for Intel...
Why should it be modded down if it applies? The point of moderation is so people can switch to articles of 3 or higher and get good comments on an article. If the post is informative who cares who wrote it or when? When attribution is polite, I think modding down hurts things far worse. It's not as if they can collect Karma anymore.
What attribution? There was no attribution on this post. If the poster had said: "hey there's an interesting and relevant posting about this in another thread" and provided a link, I'd be grateful. Plagarising someone else's work is deceitful and self-aggrandizing. I for one don't value input from plagarists.
Besides in this case the plagarised post wasn't relevant to the article and therefore wasn't informative.
This is just a reposting of an earlier Slashdot article, and should be modded down.
Congratulations - you've found an occupation even lower than troll: plagarist.
Carbon is based on the classic Mac APIs which go way back to 1984, while the Carbon API actually exists (and is available for calls) in MacOS 8.1 and higher via the CarbonLib classic extension.
Actually (if you care about all the historical details of Mac OS X's evolution) Carbon was originally based on the QuickTime library, which in turn was based on the classic Mac APIs. I was an engineer on the QuickTime team during the early Rhapsody days up through Mac OS X beta.
When Rhapsody (basically the NextStep OS) was being developed it quickly became obvious we needed to support classic Macintosh applications. QuickTime had already been ported to an early Rhapsody version, and it just so happened QuickTime already carried around an API that contained about 70% of the Mac OS functionality. This is how QuickTime runs on Windows and why porting Carbon/classic Mac apps to Windows is (relatively) painless if you know to call the QTW libraries. So Apple effectively had the start of Carbon on NextStep as a result of the QuickTime port. Rhapsody became Mac OS X, the QuickTime library support was spun out to its own team and became Carbon.
None of which really disagrees with your post, just a little more detail on the exact process.
KOffice comprises the customary litany of applications...
This posting is plagarism of the worst sort. Cut and paste in its entirety from: LinuxPlanet. Taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own without attribution is simply dishonest. It is not informative or insightful.
Just FYI, this guy's a troll. Check out his recent posts. Apparently he's also "in middle management at Honda". I highly doubt Apple are considering OpenRISC for the iPod.
Bad troll. Bad.
Just like in various other occult groups (such as RPGers), some things they find...
To (mis-) quote the wonderful Princess Bride: "Occult. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Neither physicists nor RPGers as a group could reasonably described as occult. Indeed you'd be closer to the mark if you described physics as the opposite of occult...