And there will always be people who will continue to claim that the happy run ends tomorrow. They've been doing that since AAPL was 70$ and somehow it doesn't happen. You have to understand the experience before you get why the return customer rate is 94+%. It's not a fanboism or cool factor (that may sometimes be the inital thing that gets you to the product at least to check it out). It's the actual quality and ease of use. Believe me 99% of populace couldn't care less what CPU the thing runs on or how many MP the camera has as long as it runs and does the things he/she needs and produces results. It's the geeks that squirm because it's not latest/greatest tech, but most of the time there's good reason for it. Take 4G for example. The network might even be getting there (I for one have 4G at home and benefit from it greatly for home network), but the current generation of 4G chips require a dedicated chip and draw quite a lot of power so you trade possible faster download speeds (and hype) for battery life. The next iDevices will have 4G because qualcomm has now a chip that can do most of the wireless stuff in one chip and the batter drain is less. That wasn't there yet for 4S and hence no LTE. The Android makers just wanted to scream WE'VE GOT 4G so they made it with no due consideration to end-user satisfaction (and I doubt you're satisfied with a half-day battery life on 4G).
Go use iDevices for 1 month and come back claiming you still don't understand the phenomenon...
Why the hell would Apple slash prices? They aren't at supply-demand equilibrium if you listened to the earnings call. They expected higher than usual sales and prepared with a gamble on producing tons more iPhones than previously and hoped it would pay off. The result was that they still sold out in days and were producing at maximum capacity and still had demand higher than supply lines. So there is no incentive to reduce the price from any economics point of view. There's actually incentive to RAISE the price to bring the equilibrium lower, but that has long term effects so it's better to operate at current levels and expand production capacity.
That also means there's STILL a huge demand going into the next quarter and Apple's own guidance is well above the street estimate (which was optimistic) for the next quarter even though it's the slowest of them and is shorter this time around by 1 week (the blowout quarter was longer by 1 week in turn).
So stop the bashing because you're not happy with the price, from an economic point of view Apple's doing it right and the market agrees.
Play with options. I bought AAPL february 440 call when AAPL had rocketed from 382 to 396 in one single day ca 2-3 weeks ahead of earnings for 490 usd (not that much higher than 1 share). When it hit 427 a bit over a week ago I sold it for $1100 (it was a predictable rally as earnings were coming up, year end rallies, new year rallies and what not and I only bought it after AAPL had moved up 3 days in row and one of the moves was significant (3+%). Had I held on to that option it would have been today worth ca $2200-$2500 because of the blowout quarter but also entailed a risk if there'd have been a miss. I however bought a Feb 450 call for 520 usd a week before I sold the 440. That's going to be worth ca 1200-1500 usd today because it went from being 30 usd out of the money to 5 usd in the money when AAPL hit 455 in after hours trading. Overall investment: 1010 usd, return (1100+1200-1500 or more when I sell it today or wait wether it moves up more). So a split would be nice for small investor to be able to own 100 shares and write covered calls, but you can get good returns out of AAPL with options without having to invest tens of thousands...
And these are real deals I made with my own savings money of which I put a certain % to high-risk investment (which options are as there is probability for 100% loss) that sometimes pay off big (biggest return so far is 160% in one day) and sometimes don't.
Oh and for me a dividend would be bad. In my country you can delay paying income tax on stock earned profits until you actually take out more money from your investment account than you put in (no matter how many years it may take). However dividends are automatically taxed before the amount even arrives in my account meaning that I immediately lose ca 21% (that's the income tax here) that I cannot re-invest.
You are a trickle late, that $82 was before this quarter results came in. They now have 96.7 billion USD and about 960M shares outstanding meaning ca 100$ / share is cash. So the price cannot drop below that really.:) And not making a separate post, but Apple now has more cash than the 448 of S&P 500, not 400:P
Mmm... when Steve came back in 1996 and introduced the reworked Apple (with cleaning of the board and going back to the strongpoints) he also announced a deal with Microsoft where MS injected money for non-voting shares (that MSFT made use of 5 or so years later with hefty profit) and promised to bring office etc to Apple's platform for N years. THAT did save Apple to some extent as Steve's said that they were days away from bankruptcy.
I guess you just read the title and started bashing. How about you spend an hour and watch the keynote what they actually introduced.
1) they added a lot of elements to eBooks for specific use as textbook for high school / college / university. Like note taking, study cards, indexing, glossary etc etc that was not previously incorporated in the iBooks (not sure it was in any other e-Book format/reader either though). Hence the new introduction
2) About the editions. One thing they claimed sucked about paper books was that it gets out of date fast (how fast depends on the field you're in and how close to frontline of science I guess). Probably basic algebra will remain unchanged for decades while particle physics books and biology ones probably do need updates every few years if not more often. And with paper books your only option was to buy a new book. Now however you're supposed to get an updated version for free as the author can ammend the book and you'll get the updates the same way as it happens with apps.
Oh and what new technology does Apple provide? I guess the only thing is iBook Author that's a free eBook publishing tool that's easy for use even for a high-school biology teacher that always aspired to write a better book, but never knew the tools enough to do it (there may be some other tools from Adobe etc out there, but I doubt they can compete with price (free) and ease of use). And second of all. Apple does innovate also on technology (they were the first to bring out aluminum unibodies and there are plenty of other examples), but they also innovate on procedure and market disruption. They did it with the music industry and we all reap the benefit even if you don't buy your songs through iTunes, but from other vendors as they couldn't have disrupted the record companies the way Apple did (or if they could, why didn't they for f*** sake). If Apple can pull off the same kind of market disruption with textbooks then I don't care about the possible vendor lock in, the effect would be huge and for the better. I do recommend you read the take Feynman had on textbooks when he was asked to join the decision board to select the books to be used for school and some only had covers etc...
I think you're trolling on this one. Being a PhD in particle physics and working at CERN I can claim that I longed for e-Books for years. I have shelves full of physics and math books, but my job makes me travel a lot and it really sucks to prepare a course for students on a plane and discover that you need another book that you didn't really want to lug around for the long haul. At some point I basically looked up scanned copies of every single book I had (so yeah, a bit vague on the legality of it, but at least I did have the paper copies at the office) and could lug around only my laptop with hundreds of books that I could use at any given time.
And with regard to flicking between index and notes and any particular page on the book. Did you even watch the keynote about iBooks 2? That's made trivially easy considering that this is what most people would do. Any place you mark up will be by default added to notes index that you can access from anywhere and switching back and forth between current page and index is also trivial.
Oh and I'm so tired of all the Apple bashing for Foxconn suicides. You have to think of the scale. Foxconn employs ca hundred thousand people. The factories are kind of mini-cities. I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here, but they do claim that taking the average of non-foxconn employees of about the same sample size in the vicinity in China and the employees the statistics are for the employees. They get benefits at the workplace that the average person doesn't AND their suicide rate is actually LOWER than the average for that population. Just a quick google gives that in U.S. the rate is 11 suicides per 100k and 120 suicide attempts per 100k. In China the average is ca 22-23 / 100k. So the Foxconn number is really below the average for China. Also, Apple's one of the first companies to publish the list of suppliers it's using. It's already creating waves on the stock market and they do put a huge concern on environment and publish a decent report on this. I'm not sure your average Android supplier does that...
So stop the bashing just because it's Apple and think about the real things for a while...
2) sometimes small screens just aren't enough. I'd like to see a video output port (do you hear me, Lab126 in Cupertino?)
mmm... is this a reference to iPad? Well you should know then that iPad 2 has this port. It's called the dock connector and you can get an adapter there to connect it to any preferred video output device (VGA, HDMI,...). And as iPad 2 has default screen mirroring without need of support from the apps, then you can show anything on a big screen, including books. I've got a VGA adapter and have given multiple presentations that I've done first in powerpoint, converted to PDF and kept in my PDF side of iBooks. It's nice to flick through slides with your finger so I know from experience that this works.
If of course you wanted to have a higher resolution on the other hand, then that's a separate topic, that may actually be alleviated with iPad 3 that's now rumored to have the retina display with 2048 x 1536 resolution and should through video mirroring probably give you easily a full HD output (though it'll be interesting how they do the mirroring considering most displays and projectors won't be able to match the 2048x1536 resolution).
Well I'd say enough time has passed that one should really stop worshiping that word with such attention indeed. It used to mean black slave labor, but as slavery is abolished and white and black people are doing all kinds of things together this word means more these days some fucking idiot or what not. I think the best example is this:
Anyway. As a counter point. In Estonian language the word neeger means a polite version of african origin or a person with black skin color etc. It has absolutely no context here because there never was any involvement in slave labor etc and the population of black coloured people here is rather slim (order of 100 or less in the whole country), mostly due to the climate. However if you take the other words one can use i.e. must mees (black person) etc, those have an undertone of rudeness to them.
So learn to adapt to context and don't worship a god damn word. It's as bad as the fact that the swastika is forbidden in Germany in everything. If someone designs a dress where the pattern can at some odd angle look like a swastika, then it's removed from sales etc. While the origin of the symbol is actually from hindu culture. Again, get over it and use the context...
Well having been in Japan I can tell you that even though I'm fluent in english it took me also multiple tries to understand what the heck they were trying to tell me in English. Hell I understood more of it when they were talking in Japanese and using body language. So don't blame Siri, even a person can't understand them most of the time because of some very important vowels being missaid...
Siri reads them out loud, it just also keeps a record of the responses on-screen. Unless she sends you to browse the web or gives you more complex answers. But basic ones like messages, simple answers etc it'll tell you in voice.
Erm... I regularly do that and more and see absolutely no downside. The OS X Lion disk image is 3.7GB and I moved that around network shares between the time capsule (over wifi and cable) and laptops with absolutely no issues. Could it be that your network share is bad. Might it be running a non-mac OS?:P
Oh and about walls. I have yet to see those walls on my Mac Book Pro running Lion. My daywork is doing experimental high energy physics analysis with pretty sophisticated software as well as maintain our Tier 2 compute center (some 1400 cores, 750TB of storage and gazillions of compute hours used globally) and I feel perfectly at home on OS X. I can move around large files with no issues, I can operate in a shell environment without any hinderances and at the same time enjoy a nice and intuitive GUI. I've never been able to do that on Linux no matter that I've used Linux for the past 15 years (my first Linux was redhat 3.0.3) and still need to do so as the HPC part is done on CERN Enterprise Linux and my wife's office uses Linux desktops.
I used to use Linux for ages ever since RedHat linux 3.0.3 (so eons ago). Then around Fedora Core 1/2 timeframe I got my first iBook just to try out what the fuzz was about Macs and the stuff. I was quite tech savy, had my own Linux suspend tools (swsusp was just recently added to development kernels that I of course ran), tools to automatically find which WiFi's were available and connect etc etc. I had really spent weeks in finetuning and tweaking the laptop I had before. Then I opened the iBook and it worked. Just out of the box it worked and did everything I could possibly wish. It actually took me three days to get past the yearning to tweak things until I understood that I didn't really need to tinker with anything, but could spend the whole day doing what I actually wanted to do: physics.
So now, ca 8 years later I've got a MacBook Pro, an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 and because my day work is working at CERN I'm forced to use Linux daily, maintain a datacenter and because my wife works in my office on a Linux I'm also helping her out with it. Just recently it was running SuSe 11.2 and now is running the latest ubuntu. The reason I had to upgrade it to ubuntu was that it was impossible to upgrade some random package that she needed (can't remember right now, but was quite common) and while debugging for it I found the usual cornerstone of all Linux problems. Library version mismatch. So to get the newer version of the package (no upgraded version in standard repo) I'd need to swap out two other packages. To do that I'd need in turn to swap out five others and so the domino wall continues to collapse until it's just easier to reinstall a pure fresh linux because you don't really want to fuck around with libc versions etc.
So I'm sorry, but Linux isn't a real alternative. I'm using it daily for HPC computing because our software is developed for it and is heavily regulated at the experiment and CERN level and because CERN takes care of the whole pain of library versions for me (custom repositories for the software that we use). Actually the way it's done is that the experiments keep a seeded RPM copy repository under a different path and fully manage the packages and ALL dependencies there to make sure that software that was used to take data in 2008 can still be used in 2011. Had we just stuck to trusting RedHat or what not for it we'd have been screwed over many times.
So Linux is nice and dandy if you install the latest version and you NEVER venture outside the default repository base. Forget about getting a third party app that you may want because there's a high probability that within a certain not-so-long timeframe you end up with a system that cannot be touched because it just breaks down. So your very weird comments about turning to Linux when Vista came along to solve the tech shortcomings really is just your ass talking. For an average person (the kind that makes up 99% of computer usage and of which 1% know the internals) linux is not an alternative no matter how much you advocate it (I used to about 10 years ago, but gave up once I had experienced a number of other OS's enough to understand how bad Linux really is).
The real reason people buy iProducts is because they work. The battery lasts ages in real life scenarios, not just clinical tests to get the spec sheet out, the OS is easy and comfortable to use without losing on the desktop side any benefits (it's a full blown UNIX so I've got a lot of the experiment software easily ported to it and most of the final analysis I run on my laptop developing the analysis code in Xcode and tinkering the stuff in shell). And on my phone or tablet the last thing I want to do is tinker with it. It's supposed to just work and provide the comfortable environment to consume media and content. I will not comment much on Android here because I haven't used Android based devices for prolonged time, but from what I've understood from others, it's based on Linux with the relevant shortcomings as it's not fully tuned and done for mobile devices (main
"In order to perform this study, the OPERA Collaboration teamed up with experts in metrology from CERN and other institutions to perform a series of high precision measurements of the distance between the source and the detector, and of the neutrinos’ time of flight. The distance between the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an uncertainty of 20 cm over the 730 km travel path."
Yes, wanted to make the same comment that hardware purchases are usually coming from a different budget line than power/rackspace/cooling/admins so one cannot look at TCO in EDU case because individual research groups never add up to it. If one manages the whole university/insititute compute infrastructure, then yes TCO plays a role, but individual groups usually get a bag of cash for HW and never get any dough for support/electricity and usually don't have to pay it either, it's those pesky grads that do the admin work no matter how inefficiently...
Yes, my recommendation would be also, we do loads of LHC data analysis and simulations and have found that for real science real cores outweigh hyberthreaded ones so we run Opteron 6172 x2 in supermicro chassis that fits 4 servers into 2RU. The cost of such a box of course is ca 11keur, but it gives 96 cores 192GB ram. Now she can get for half the money that she has about half of that so 48 cores 96GB ram should be doable using SM boxes and you can scale up/down with CPU frequency to adjust the cost and maybe adjust total RAM alongside to fit in the budget. If she plans to later expand she may actually want to spend the money to get the 2U chassis with only 2 of the 4 machines present and later add one/two more by just buying the board with cpu/ram.
In The 2010 interview to Walt he did confess they did the iPad first, but shelved it when he saw the display and rubber scrolling in action as he understood he could make a killer phone instead. So you logic is a bit off as he DID start off with the tablet, he just redid the release cycle mid-way through...
I have never understood the need to push people to donate. If they want to donate they will. If they don't then I see absolutely no need to ask it of them. He's earned the money so he's free to do what ever he wants with it. People who claim he MUST donate because he's a successful enterpreneur and should share the wealth are just plain stupid idiots. If he really wanted to get improve stuff he'd finance some startups or found more companies that earn people income, but just giving the money away to charity is plain stupid. Most charities have such huge overheads that only a small fraction of the money makes it to those in need and even then the need is not always best served by just throwing money and goods at it.
The good old saying that give a man fish and you've fed him for a day, teach him to fish and you've fed him for years to come still hold true. I've created a successful small company and live off quite nicely, but I wouldn't just go out and donate stuff to people just to feel better etc. There are rare cases where a helpful hand really helps, but investing the money in something that makes life in general better and allows you to reap the benefits of this R&D is a way better method. So if someone wants to invest in R&D of some cure and then get a % of the royalties I'd say that's a heck better spent money even if some of the time the R&D leads to nothing. Remember, 80% or so of money given to the red cross is spent on overhead so if one out of four R&D ventures comes back successful you've already beaten the charity market...
Am on an iPad on crappy network so won't bother to go looking for the docs, but working at CERN I can shed some light to the CERN mentality.
It's been asked a hundred times and the answer by CERN management is always the same, ALL CERN dIscoveries are given to the public domain (from a new particle to a cheap insulation material to what not other technical invention). Even when patents are taken it's to protect the public domain from a hostile abuse by some corporation. No licensing fees are asked. So I guess T.B.L. working at CERN should have meant that the same policy applies...
Oh you can bet that D0 is looking to repeat it now and for sure CMS and ATLAS will. It won't take long to have a confirm or deny from one of them... Being in one I already see a mass of work that has started to investigate this result and cross check it... And yes, the easiest explanation to the bump would be a shift in jet energy scale that's not even far from what they allow in the systematic errors. That shift would make the searched for di-boson peak match better and the bump would disappear... Then again, this seems like a stupid thing to miss by the CDF collaboration...
Well CMS is one of the large experiments at the LHC. The data produced should reach pentabytes per year and add to it the simulated data we have a hellava lot of data to store and address. What we use is a logical filename (LFN) format. We have a global "filesystem" where different storage elements have files in a filesystem organized in a hierarchical subdirectory structure. As an example:/store/mc/Summer10/Wenu/GEN-SIM-RECO/START37_V5_S09-v1/0136/0400DDE2-F681-DF11-BA13-00215E21DC1E.root
the/store is a beginning marker of the logical filename region that different sites can map differently (who uses NFS, who uses http etc etc)/mc/ -> it's monte carlo data/Summer10/ -> the data was produced during Summer of 2010/Wenu/ -> it's a simulation of W decaying to electron and neutrino/GEN-SIM-RECO/ -> the data generation steps that have been done/START37_.../ -> The detector conditions that have been used (the actual full description of the conditions is in some central database)/0136/ -> is the serial number (actually I'm not 100%, but it's related to the production workflow etc)/0400DDE2-F681-DF11-BA13-00215E21DC1E.root -> the actual filename, the hash is due to the fact that the process has to make sure there are no conflicts in filenames
Another example:/store/data/Run2010A/MinimumBias/RECO/Jul16thReReco-v1/0000/0018523B-D490-DF11-BF5B-00E08178C111.root
This file is real data, taken during the first run of 2010 and filtered to the MinimumBias primary dataset (related to event trigger content). The datafiles in there contain RECO content and were done during the re-reconstruction process on July 16th. Then there's again the serial number (block edges define new serial numbers) and then the filename.
You could use a similar structure to differentiate the datafiles that you actually use. The good thing is that you can map such filenames separately everywhere as long as you change the prefix according to the protocol used (we use for example file:, http:, gridftp:, srm: etc). You can also easily share data with other collaborating sites as long as everyone uses similar structure it's quite good. No need for special databases etc. If you need some lookup functionality, then one option is a simple find (assuming you have filesystem access) or you could build a database in parallel and you can use the LFN structure to index things etc.
That is true, the amount of statistics currently available at LHC is negligible. The main good thing higher energy does is open up channels that were kinematically impossible at Tevatron. But that's also negligible considering the increase of ca 400 GeV only. Once we go to 7 TeV collisions in January or so the statistics might not mean THAT much anymore. As far as I know some channels (like ttbar production) go up in cross section with the energy so many orders of magnitude that LHC should best Tevatron already in the first year, but then again there will be plenty of other channels that will need years of running to match Tevatron:) So I hope they don't shut Tevatron down the moment LHC passes them in some channels, but do let the two compete for a while:)
Slashdot Mirror
And there will always be people who will continue to claim that the happy run ends tomorrow. They've been doing that since AAPL was 70$ and somehow it doesn't happen. You have to understand the experience before you get why the return customer rate is 94+%. It's not a fanboism or cool factor (that may sometimes be the inital thing that gets you to the product at least to check it out). It's the actual quality and ease of use. Believe me 99% of populace couldn't care less what CPU the thing runs on or how many MP the camera has as long as it runs and does the things he/she needs and produces results. It's the geeks that squirm because it's not latest/greatest tech, but most of the time there's good reason for it. Take 4G for example. The network might even be getting there (I for one have 4G at home and benefit from it greatly for home network), but the current generation of 4G chips require a dedicated chip and draw quite a lot of power so you trade possible faster download speeds (and hype) for battery life. The next iDevices will have 4G because qualcomm has now a chip that can do most of the wireless stuff in one chip and the batter drain is less. That wasn't there yet for 4S and hence no LTE. The Android makers just wanted to scream WE'VE GOT 4G so they made it with no due consideration to end-user satisfaction (and I doubt you're satisfied with a half-day battery life on 4G).
Go use iDevices for 1 month and come back claiming you still don't understand the phenomenon...
Why the hell would Apple slash prices? They aren't at supply-demand equilibrium if you listened to the earnings call. They expected higher than usual sales and prepared with a gamble on producing tons more iPhones than previously and hoped it would pay off. The result was that they still sold out in days and were producing at maximum capacity and still had demand higher than supply lines. So there is no incentive to reduce the price from any economics point of view. There's actually incentive to RAISE the price to bring the equilibrium lower, but that has long term effects so it's better to operate at current levels and expand production capacity.
That also means there's STILL a huge demand going into the next quarter and Apple's own guidance is well above the street estimate (which was optimistic) for the next quarter even though it's the slowest of them and is shorter this time around by 1 week (the blowout quarter was longer by 1 week in turn).
So stop the bashing because you're not happy with the price, from an economic point of view Apple's doing it right and the market agrees.
Play with options. I bought AAPL february 440 call when AAPL had rocketed from 382 to 396 in one single day ca 2-3 weeks ahead of earnings for 490 usd (not that much higher than 1 share). When it hit 427 a bit over a week ago I sold it for $1100 (it was a predictable rally as earnings were coming up, year end rallies, new year rallies and what not and I only bought it after AAPL had moved up 3 days in row and one of the moves was significant (3+%). Had I held on to that option it would have been today worth ca $2200-$2500 because of the blowout quarter but also entailed a risk if there'd have been a miss. I however bought a Feb 450 call for 520 usd a week before I sold the 440. That's going to be worth ca 1200-1500 usd today because it went from being 30 usd out of the money to 5 usd in the money when AAPL hit 455 in after hours trading. Overall investment: 1010 usd, return (1100+1200-1500 or more when I sell it today or wait wether it moves up more). So a split would be nice for small investor to be able to own 100 shares and write covered calls, but you can get good returns out of AAPL with options without having to invest tens of thousands...
And these are real deals I made with my own savings money of which I put a certain % to high-risk investment (which options are as there is probability for 100% loss) that sometimes pay off big (biggest return so far is 160% in one day) and sometimes don't.
Oh and for me a dividend would be bad. In my country you can delay paying income tax on stock earned profits until you actually take out more money from your investment account than you put in (no matter how many years it may take). However dividends are automatically taxed before the amount even arrives in my account meaning that I immediately lose ca 21% (that's the income tax here) that I cannot re-invest.
You are a trickle late, that $82 was before this quarter results came in. They now have 96.7 billion USD and about 960M shares outstanding meaning ca 100$ / share is cash. So the price cannot drop below that really. :) And not making a separate post, but Apple now has more cash than the 448 of S&P 500, not 400 :P
Mmm... when Steve came back in 1996 and introduced the reworked Apple (with cleaning of the board and going back to the strongpoints) he also announced a deal with Microsoft where MS injected money for non-voting shares (that MSFT made use of 5 or so years later with hefty profit) and promised to bring office etc to Apple's platform for N years. THAT did save Apple to some extent as Steve's said that they were days away from bankruptcy.
I guess you just read the title and started bashing. How about you spend an hour and watch the keynote what they actually introduced.
1) they added a lot of elements to eBooks for specific use as textbook for high school / college / university. Like note taking, study cards, indexing, glossary etc etc that was not previously incorporated in the iBooks (not sure it was in any other e-Book format/reader either though). Hence the new introduction
2) About the editions. One thing they claimed sucked about paper books was that it gets out of date fast (how fast depends on the field you're in and how close to frontline of science I guess). Probably basic algebra will remain unchanged for decades while particle physics books and biology ones probably do need updates every few years if not more often. And with paper books your only option was to buy a new book. Now however you're supposed to get an updated version for free as the author can ammend the book and you'll get the updates the same way as it happens with apps.
Oh and what new technology does Apple provide? I guess the only thing is iBook Author that's a free eBook publishing tool that's easy for use even for a high-school biology teacher that always aspired to write a better book, but never knew the tools enough to do it (there may be some other tools from Adobe etc out there, but I doubt they can compete with price (free) and ease of use). And second of all. Apple does innovate also on technology (they were the first to bring out aluminum unibodies and there are plenty of other examples), but they also innovate on procedure and market disruption. They did it with the music industry and we all reap the benefit even if you don't buy your songs through iTunes, but from other vendors as they couldn't have disrupted the record companies the way Apple did (or if they could, why didn't they for f*** sake). If Apple can pull off the same kind of market disruption with textbooks then I don't care about the possible vendor lock in, the effect would be huge and for the better. I do recommend you read the take Feynman had on textbooks when he was asked to join the decision board to select the books to be used for school and some only had covers etc...
Ever tried to travel with 10 books? How'd it feel?
I think you're trolling on this one. Being a PhD in particle physics and working at CERN I can claim that I longed for e-Books for years. I have shelves full of physics and math books, but my job makes me travel a lot and it really sucks to prepare a course for students on a plane and discover that you need another book that you didn't really want to lug around for the long haul. At some point I basically looked up scanned copies of every single book I had (so yeah, a bit vague on the legality of it, but at least I did have the paper copies at the office) and could lug around only my laptop with hundreds of books that I could use at any given time.
And with regard to flicking between index and notes and any particular page on the book. Did you even watch the keynote about iBooks 2? That's made trivially easy considering that this is what most people would do. Any place you mark up will be by default added to notes index that you can access from anywhere and switching back and forth between current page and index is also trivial.
Oh and I'm so tired of all the Apple bashing for Foxconn suicides. You have to think of the scale. Foxconn employs ca hundred thousand people. The factories are kind of mini-cities. I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here, but they do claim that taking the average of non-foxconn employees of about the same sample size in the vicinity in China and the employees the statistics are for the employees. They get benefits at the workplace that the average person doesn't AND their suicide rate is actually LOWER than the average for that population. Just a quick google gives that in U.S. the rate is 11 suicides per 100k and 120 suicide attempts per 100k. In China the average is ca 22-23 / 100k. So the Foxconn number is really below the average for China. Also, Apple's one of the first companies to publish the list of suppliers it's using. It's already creating waves on the stock market and they do put a huge concern on environment and publish a decent report on this. I'm not sure your average Android supplier does that...
So stop the bashing just because it's Apple and think about the real things for a while...
Thanks, didn't know that. One learns something every day :)
2) sometimes small screens just aren't enough. I'd like to see a video output port (do you hear me, Lab126 in Cupertino?)
mmm... is this a reference to iPad? Well you should know then that iPad 2 has this port. It's called the dock connector and you can get an adapter there to connect it to any preferred video output device (VGA, HDMI,...). And as iPad 2 has default screen mirroring without need of support from the apps, then you can show anything on a big screen, including books. I've got a VGA adapter and have given multiple presentations that I've done first in powerpoint, converted to PDF and kept in my PDF side of iBooks. It's nice to flick through slides with your finger so I know from experience that this works.
If of course you wanted to have a higher resolution on the other hand, then that's a separate topic, that may actually be alleviated with iPad 3 that's now rumored to have the retina display with 2048 x 1536 resolution and should through video mirroring probably give you easily a full HD output (though it'll be interesting how they do the mirroring considering most displays and projectors won't be able to match the 2048x1536 resolution).
Well I'd say enough time has passed that one should really stop worshiping that word with such attention indeed. It used to mean black slave labor, but as slavery is abolished and white and black people are doing all kinds of things together this word means more these days some fucking idiot or what not. I think the best example is this:
http://bash.org/?739936
Anyway. As a counter point. In Estonian language the word neeger means a polite version of african origin or a person with black skin color etc. It has absolutely no context here because there never was any involvement in slave labor etc and the population of black coloured people here is rather slim (order of 100 or less in the whole country), mostly due to the climate. However if you take the other words one can use i.e. must mees (black person) etc, those have an undertone of rudeness to them.
So learn to adapt to context and don't worship a god damn word. It's as bad as the fact that the swastika is forbidden in Germany in everything. If someone designs a dress where the pattern can at some odd angle look like a swastika, then it's removed from sales etc. While the origin of the symbol is actually from hindu culture. Again, get over it and use the context...
Well having been in Japan I can tell you that even though I'm fluent in english it took me also multiple tries to understand what the heck they were trying to tell me in English. Hell I understood more of it when they were talking in Japanese and using body language. So don't blame Siri, even a person can't understand them most of the time because of some very important vowels being missaid...
Siri reads them out loud, it just also keeps a record of the responses on-screen. Unless she sends you to browse the web or gives you more complex answers. But basic ones like messages, simple answers etc it'll tell you in voice.
Erm... I regularly do that and more and see absolutely no downside. The OS X Lion disk image is 3.7GB and I moved that around network shares between the time capsule (over wifi and cable) and laptops with absolutely no issues. Could it be that your network share is bad. Might it be running a non-mac OS? :P
Oh and about walls. I have yet to see those walls on my Mac Book Pro running Lion. My daywork is doing experimental high energy physics analysis with pretty sophisticated software as well as maintain our Tier 2 compute center (some 1400 cores, 750TB of storage and gazillions of compute hours used globally) and I feel perfectly at home on OS X. I can move around large files with no issues, I can operate in a shell environment without any hinderances and at the same time enjoy a nice and intuitive GUI. I've never been able to do that on Linux no matter that I've used Linux for the past 15 years (my first Linux was redhat 3.0.3) and still need to do so as the HPC part is done on CERN Enterprise Linux and my wife's office uses Linux desktops.
I used to use Linux for ages ever since RedHat linux 3.0.3 (so eons ago). Then around Fedora Core 1/2 timeframe I got my first iBook just to try out what the fuzz was about Macs and the stuff. I was quite tech savy, had my own Linux suspend tools (swsusp was just recently added to development kernels that I of course ran), tools to automatically find which WiFi's were available and connect etc etc. I had really spent weeks in finetuning and tweaking the laptop I had before. Then I opened the iBook and it worked. Just out of the box it worked and did everything I could possibly wish. It actually took me three days to get past the yearning to tweak things until I understood that I didn't really need to tinker with anything, but could spend the whole day doing what I actually wanted to do: physics.
So now, ca 8 years later I've got a MacBook Pro, an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 and because my day work is working at CERN I'm forced to use Linux daily, maintain a datacenter and because my wife works in my office on a Linux I'm also helping her out with it. Just recently it was running SuSe 11.2 and now is running the latest ubuntu. The reason I had to upgrade it to ubuntu was that it was impossible to upgrade some random package that she needed (can't remember right now, but was quite common) and while debugging for it I found the usual cornerstone of all Linux problems. Library version mismatch. So to get the newer version of the package (no upgraded version in standard repo) I'd need to swap out two other packages. To do that I'd need in turn to swap out five others and so the domino wall continues to collapse until it's just easier to reinstall a pure fresh linux because you don't really want to fuck around with libc versions etc.
So I'm sorry, but Linux isn't a real alternative. I'm using it daily for HPC computing because our software is developed for it and is heavily regulated at the experiment and CERN level and because CERN takes care of the whole pain of library versions for me (custom repositories for the software that we use). Actually the way it's done is that the experiments keep a seeded RPM copy repository under a different path and fully manage the packages and ALL dependencies there to make sure that software that was used to take data in 2008 can still be used in 2011. Had we just stuck to trusting RedHat or what not for it we'd have been screwed over many times.
So Linux is nice and dandy if you install the latest version and you NEVER venture outside the default repository base. Forget about getting a third party app that you may want because there's a high probability that within a certain not-so-long timeframe you end up with a system that cannot be touched because it just breaks down. So your very weird comments about turning to Linux when Vista came along to solve the tech shortcomings really is just your ass talking. For an average person (the kind that makes up 99% of computer usage and of which 1% know the internals) linux is not an alternative no matter how much you advocate it (I used to about 10 years ago, but gave up once I had experienced a number of other OS's enough to understand how bad Linux really is).
The real reason people buy iProducts is because they work. The battery lasts ages in real life scenarios, not just clinical tests to get the spec sheet out, the OS is easy and comfortable to use without losing on the desktop side any benefits (it's a full blown UNIX so I've got a lot of the experiment software easily ported to it and most of the final analysis I run on my laptop developing the analysis code in Xcode and tinkering the stuff in shell). And on my phone or tablet the last thing I want to do is tinker with it. It's supposed to just work and provide the comfortable environment to consume media and content. I will not comment much on Android here because I haven't used Android based devices for prolonged time, but from what I've understood from others, it's based on Linux with the relevant shortcomings as it's not fully tuned and done for mobile devices (main
Quote from CERN press release today:
"In order to perform this study, the OPERA Collaboration teamed up with experts in metrology from CERN and other institutions to perform a series of high precision measurements of the distance between the source and the detector, and of the neutrinos’ time of flight. The distance between the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an uncertainty of 20 cm over the 730 km travel path."
Yes, wanted to make the same comment that hardware purchases are usually coming from a different budget line than power/rackspace/cooling/admins so one cannot look at TCO in EDU case because individual research groups never add up to it. If one manages the whole university/insititute compute infrastructure, then yes TCO plays a role, but individual groups usually get a bag of cash for HW and never get any dough for support/electricity and usually don't have to pay it either, it's those pesky grads that do the admin work no matter how inefficiently...
Yes, my recommendation would be also, we do loads of LHC data analysis and simulations and have found that for real science real cores outweigh hyberthreaded ones so we run Opteron 6172 x2 in supermicro chassis that fits 4 servers into 2RU. The cost of such a box of course is ca 11keur, but it gives 96 cores 192GB ram. Now she can get for half the money that she has about half of that so 48 cores 96GB ram should be doable using SM boxes and you can scale up/down with CPU frequency to adjust the cost and maybe adjust total RAM alongside to fit in the budget. If she plans to later expand she may actually want to spend the money to get the 2U chassis with only 2 of the 4 machines present and later add one/two more by just buying the board with cpu/ram.
In The 2010 interview to Walt he did confess they did the iPad first, but shelved it when he saw the display and rubber scrolling in action as he understood he could make a killer phone instead. So you logic is a bit off as he DID start off with the tablet, he just redid the release cycle mid-way through...
I have never understood the need to push people to donate. If they want to donate they will. If they don't then I see absolutely no need to ask it of them. He's earned the money so he's free to do what ever he wants with it. People who claim he MUST donate because he's a successful enterpreneur and should share the wealth are just plain stupid idiots. If he really wanted to get improve stuff he'd finance some startups or found more companies that earn people income, but just giving the money away to charity is plain stupid. Most charities have such huge overheads that only a small fraction of the money makes it to those in need and even then the need is not always best served by just throwing money and goods at it.
The good old saying that give a man fish and you've fed him for a day, teach him to fish and you've fed him for years to come still hold true. I've created a successful small company and live off quite nicely, but I wouldn't just go out and donate stuff to people just to feel better etc. There are rare cases where a helpful hand really helps, but investing the money in something that makes life in general better and allows you to reap the benefits of this R&D is a way better method. So if someone wants to invest in R&D of some cure and then get a % of the royalties I'd say that's a heck better spent money even if some of the time the R&D leads to nothing. Remember, 80% or so of money given to the red cross is spent on overhead so if one out of four R&D ventures comes back successful you've already beaten the charity market...
Am on an iPad on crappy network so won't bother to go looking for the docs, but working at CERN I can shed some light to the CERN mentality.
It's been asked a hundred times and the answer by CERN management is always the same, ALL CERN dIscoveries are given to the public domain (from a new particle to a cheap insulation material to what not other technical invention). Even when patents are taken it's to protect the public domain from a hostile abuse by some corporation. No licensing fees are asked. So I guess T.B.L. working at CERN should have meant that the same policy applies...
If you happen to come to Geneva let me know, might show you around CERN :)
Oh you can bet that D0 is looking to repeat it now and for sure CMS and ATLAS will. It won't take long to have a confirm or deny from one of them... Being in one I already see a mass of work that has started to investigate this result and cross check it... And yes, the easiest explanation to the bump would be a shift in jet energy scale that's not even far from what they allow in the systematic errors. That shift would make the searched for di-boson peak match better and the bump would disappear... Then again, this seems like a stupid thing to miss by the CDF collaboration...
Well CMS is one of the large experiments at the LHC. The data produced should reach pentabytes per year and add to it the simulated data we have a hellava lot of data to store and address. What we use is a logical filename (LFN) format. We have a global "filesystem" where different storage elements have files in a filesystem organized in a hierarchical subdirectory structure. As an example: /store/mc/Summer10/Wenu/GEN-SIM-RECO/START37_V5_S09-v1/0136/0400DDE2-F681-DF11-BA13-00215E21DC1E.root
the /store is a beginning marker of the logical filename region that different sites can map differently (who uses NFS, who uses http etc etc) /mc/ -> it's monte carlo data /Summer10/ -> the data was produced during Summer of 2010 /Wenu/ -> it's a simulation of W decaying to electron and neutrino /GEN-SIM-RECO/ -> the data generation steps that have been done /START37_.../ -> The detector conditions that have been used (the actual full description of the conditions is in some central database) /0136/ -> is the serial number (actually I'm not 100%, but it's related to the production workflow etc) /0400DDE2-F681-DF11-BA13-00215E21DC1E.root -> the actual filename, the hash is due to the fact that the process has to make sure there are no conflicts in filenames
Another example: /store/data/Run2010A/MinimumBias/RECO/Jul16thReReco-v1/0000/0018523B-D490-DF11-BF5B-00E08178C111.root
This file is real data, taken during the first run of 2010 and filtered to the MinimumBias primary dataset (related to event trigger content). The datafiles in there contain RECO content and were done during the re-reconstruction process on July 16th. Then there's again the serial number (block edges define new serial numbers) and then the filename.
You could use a similar structure to differentiate the datafiles that you actually use. The good thing is that you can map such filenames separately everywhere as long as you change the prefix according to the protocol used (we use for example file:, http:, gridftp:, srm: etc). You can also easily share data with other collaborating sites as long as everyone uses similar structure it's quite good. No need for special databases etc. If you need some lookup functionality, then one option is a simple find (assuming you have filesystem access) or you could build a database in parallel and you can use the LFN structure to index things etc.
That is true, the amount of statistics currently available at LHC is negligible. The main good thing higher energy does is open up channels that were kinematically impossible at Tevatron. But that's also negligible considering the increase of ca 400 GeV only. Once we go to 7 TeV collisions in January or so the statistics might not mean THAT much anymore. As far as I know some channels (like ttbar production) go up in cross section with the energy so many orders of magnitude that LHC should best Tevatron already in the first year, but then again there will be plenty of other channels that will need years of running to match Tevatron :) So I hope they don't shut Tevatron down the moment LHC passes them in some channels, but do let the two compete for a while :)