Actually there were plans. This is from a personal conversation I had with one of the principles of Bungie several years ago and a conversation with Glenda Adams of Westlake after that. (I was on the Halo beta test team for OS X.)
I am an OS X user almost exclusively now. However, I base my comment on total licenses, not on desktop licenses. While I believe that in many cases OS X is a superior solution (if not the best option for a desktop OS), I don't think there is any rational person that would make a coherent argument that there are fewer boxes running Linux than there are OS X. Every market survey I have looked at indicated more Linux boxes than OS X boxes. I believe in some areas of markets this is changing but currently.....
Well, I hate to say it but one of the biggest titles coming to Linux was pre-empted from Linux, OS X, and even Windows in favor of the X-box. Yes, eventually it shipped for Windows and OS X, but Linux was left out in the cold when Microsoft purchased Bungie. Bungie had plans for simultaneous release of Halo on Windows and OS X to be followed soon by a Linux release. That all changed when Bungie was bought out. Honestly given the consolidation within the game industry, I don't see much hope for games on Linux for a few years yet which is sort of odd given Linux's marketshare as being so much greater than OS X. Perhaps Toms Hardware is correct when it comes to Linux being a true desktop replacement?
Would you care to define how you are using the term "dimension" here? Has string theory revealed that turtles see in seven dimensions?
No, read up on image math. There is an extensive literature with respect to color vision and color perception. I seem to remember a pretty good website talking about image math and mathematical dimensionality with respect to a great program NIH Image, nee Image J.
Specifically with respect to turtles, they have a number of completely separate image processing channels over and above primate vision whereas we (humans) are limited to three separate channels with one channel piggybacking upon another channel. In fact, one way turtles do this is by placing little oil droplets on the end of their photoreceptors that function as additional spectral filters.
You're either way, way, way beyond me or you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
No offense intended, but I do suspect the former.
Again, what's your point? Human eyes are a subset of the set of every eye's capability? No kidding.
Human eyes are not a subset of every eyes capability. There are eyes for instance that are organized very differently from ours. For example, take a look at the morphology of the octopus eye. Very interesting and effective design and excellent optics, but the octopus retina in completely inverted with respect to the mammalian retina.
I'm also disturbed by your claim that other eyes have been evolving for "longer"....
Well, go back and look at a timeline of evolution. There are organisms whose lineage is much older than the human lineage. Also around the Jurassic period, there was a point at which the common mammalian ancestor went underground and mammalians "lost" their eyes. When they developed again, they did so by co-opting certain visual circuitry and piggybacking the rod pathway on top of the cone pathway. Thus, human eyes (retinas) are evolutionarily "younger" than other retinas in for example zebrafish or amphibians like the salamander or turtle. (did you also know that those organisms can fix their retinas when damaged even though they are more complex than ours?).
which is that improvements aren't free once your reach (near) optimality.
Again, you are making the assumption that human eyes have been optimized to the best they can possibly be. That is an error of thinking because while some things are truly impressive, they are not completely optimal.
This is assuming you don't throw the whole thing out and start anew with inorganic technology, which can probably be made vastly superior with work
Actually, biological photoreceptors are capable of responding to a single photon of light. This is something that inorganic technologies have so far not been able to duplicate without a not insignificant array of hardware that takes up much more space and arguably is not as sensitive or precise as biological photoreceptors.
I hear this line a lot, usually supported by "look, there's this one thing that a dolphin can do as well as a human", completely ignoring the fact that we do much, much, much more than "one thing" well.
You are thinking from truly a egocentric (human centric) viewpoint and not a scientific standpoint. There are capabilities that other organisms have that we are just learning about. Dolphins ability to process information in ultrasound, map their world and even see through things using ultrasound. Elephants communicating in infrasound is another thing that comes to mind.
Humans aren't the best at everything universally, but there is nothing on this planet that even comes close for general purpose cognition.
Use specific language and you will make more sense. Say something like "humans are capable of logical thought and applying reason and strategy to problem solving to greater degree than other known organisms" and I will agree.
However, it would have been even funnier if you were a little more subtle about it. Perhaps something like...."Gee, that's not what my parents told me about going blind....that and something about hairy palms."
Your subject line might be more appropriate than you think. I am actually concerned about the use of Viagra, because it is a phosphodiesterase inhibitor.......If you read about how photoreceptors work, phosphodiesterase does have a role in the transduction of vision and there is overlap with the activity of Viagra with the phosphodiesterase subtypes found in photoreceptors. Are we setting a bunch of folks up for vision deficits down the road a few years?
Technically and mathematically you are correct. However, what I was referring to is turtles or fish being able to see in two, three or four more dimensions than we currently do. Some organisms can also see polarized light as well.
The curves for those receptors don't completely overlap.
Ah, it depends upon which organism you are referring to. I assume you mean humans and if so, there is considerable overlap in the pigments, especially in the red and green pigments. The blue and green also overlap to some extent.
Of course human eyes aren't a proper superset of every eye's capability in the world.
They are an evolutionary subset of eyes as our eyes evolved later than the other retinas that have had longer to evolve and develop.
But they are quite good for what they do,
That is your perception. If I were to design them anew, I would make the retinas more like other organisms and design the optics using other organisms optima.
There isn't room in one eye for that, and if you did jam it all in you'd be bitching about our crappy resolution!
Actually, you may be surprised at what one could do and how things could be improved.
and the brain behind them is unsurpassed, if you consider seeing not just as raw pixel collection but as understanding the world
Two completely different issues here. Also you should consider that there are some organisms which have specialized portions of their brains that are more sophisticated than ours as well. Humans are not necessarily the best at things you might presume we are.
Nobody else has a visual system that can read.
Well, now you are talking intelligence and interpretation. There is plenty of evidence that suggests the resolution of the image coming out of the retina is plenty good to read in many different organisms from fish, to octopus, to birds, to turtles, to dolphins etc...etc...etc... If you are talking about being able to understand symbolic representation of higher order information, dolphins, gorillas and even octopus can learn to interpret symbology from meaning and their retinas are good enough to resolve finely detailed information.
Artificial eyes will be cool but it's going to be hard to jam any more info down the optic nerve and through the visual system that we already are unless we do a full brain replacement.
Actually, there is plenty of bandwidth available. Where are you getting your information?
There was the Wired article and Slashdot articles about the Wired article talking about a gentleman who has used a system set up by William Dobelle. This system uses a grid of electrodes on the surface of the cortex that generates phosphenes or perceptual points of light. What is not accomplished here is any real correlation with the points of light and the grid of stimulating electrodes. Furthermore, the phosphenes are not consistent among many other problems and potential problems with the Dobelle system. Also, it should be noted that William Dobelle was not granted permission to use this system in the United States and thus had to move to Portugal where he has these systems implanted in patients and he has not been entirely honest with his patients and what they can expect from these systems. Finally, the approach with surface mount electrodes requires significantly higher current to stimulate the cortex (think complications of epilepsy, and his patients have experienced seizures) than with other systems like Richard Normann's system which uses an implantable electrode array.
Yeah, believe it or not, that is the compressed version. The native version as it came out of Word (boy that was a serious chore and I hope Apple can do better with their new word processor) was around 769 MB's due to all of the figures. I could prepare another version with lower resolution figures that would be suitable for the web and not publication I suppose, but ever since finishing the dissertation, I have been insanely busy with other work and other publications.
What we are going to need however is 1) a way of understanding how the retina is currently constructed (believe it or not, but after 150 years of study, we still don't know exactly how the circuits in the retina are constructed) and 2) how to interface the new films or chips to the cortex to make sensible visual signals. I am optimistic this can occur but we are still a number of years out.
Perhaps in thirty years we could obtain some degree of enhancement for our eyes that would be optically based. However, a more pressing (and needed) benefit will be a cure or fix for folks with vision loss. "Zoom lenses" and such could relatively easily be accomplished with bionically enhanced optics, but the real trick is going to be designing and implementing the hardware/wetware interface and creating true bionic retinas. Bionic implants for retinal degenerations as currently implemented are not going to work for a variety of reasons (read my doctoral dissertation to find out why), but there are other approaches that can be taken or modifications that will be successful (part of my current work). Also alternative ways of implementing the interface cortically will likely have some success (not my work, but it is of my colleagues). Artificial retinas are going to be harder than artificial cochleas for the hearing impaired or cortical control of motor functions which are both applications that are having some success currently. The retina is a much more complex tissue with (in our eyes) 55-60 different classes of neurons all wired together in a precise manner to generate proper signals for image interpretability. As an interesting aside, I have said this before on Slashdot, but human eyes are pretty pathetic in terms of their sophistication. Birds, fish and many reptiles have much more sophisticated retinas that perceive what we would term a multi-spectral visual world. A visual scene much richer that the simple three-space world we currently see.
Unfortunately, we have decided to STOP selling these lasers to the general public. Too many people have been doing stupid things with lasers recently, and this product is misunderstood. This laser DOES NOT pose a threat to airplanes or pilots
And what do you want to bet they had a visit from their local FBI field office? Purchase records subpoenaed?
It is also interesting to note that even after the introduction of the Lisa and the Macintosh, the Apple IIe was in such demand, it was actually produced up until 1993 for a platform lifetime of the Apple II for seventeen years or so which is an eternity in the desktop computing world.
This book seems to leave off when Steve Jobs left after Sculley took over the company and misses the whole revolution that has occurred since then so while the book ends with Macintosh, we really should be considering: Apple II, Macintosh, the new Macintosh (nee OS X) and now iPod.
Perhaps the answer to this question this book asks about lightning striking twice lies in the care and craftsmanship that Apple puts into their products. Like Steve Jobs other companies Pixar and NeXT, there is a substance to Apple's products that tells a story. It goes beyond simple packaging to encompass the whole user experience. With Apple's products, there is considerable effort put into 1) Will this product meet a need and accomplish that goal better than anything else available? 2) Crafting the user experience to optimize their interface with whatever task the product is designed to serve 3) Make sure it does not suck (high praise). If a product does not meet these criteria, it is shelved like so many other projects that never rise to the top at Apple. (like the Palm device and an early effort at co-branding a phone)
The other interesting thing about Apple is the diversity of folks that actually work for them. They prefer to employ folks with advanced degrees, have a significant number of artists and creative folks working there and I seem to remember that one of their product managers was an MD, PhD. So, many of the folks there are creative and are trained to think critically about issues which is reflected in the products Apple creates. The reality with producing great things is that they evolve during development. There is great pain and effort that go into producing significant things and it requires a dedicated team of folks that are brought together by a common vision. Apple (more precisely the people that comprise Apple) are driven by a common passion to create something just that much better than what is available and to create "cool" things that influence how we interact with computers and the data that drives our lives (movies, music, scientific data etc...etc...etc...).
At least in the Atlantic, we have an early warning system for Tsunamis and a well developed system of earthquake monitoring that would likely save many lives on the eastern seaboard. All of those expensive homes up on the coast though......
There is nothing that I talked about in my post that did not take serving up web pages into account. In fact, the standard OS X is robust enough to withstand a Slashdotting on even low end hardware. Witness a little old G3 iMac hosting a vision education resource we have here. This little iMac is running a standard OS X license (not server) and hosts upwards of 45,000 hits per day from all over the world. Not huge traffic, but pretty impressive for a desktop OS and a 400 Mhz G3.
So, what is it you are talking about specifically?
Based upon my experience with IRIX and Solaris (with some Linux), I would have to say that most of the things that *NIX did poorly have been rectified with OS X. I would have said OS X was still lacking true 64bitness, but that is coming in 10.4 rather quickly now. The numbers of Macs involved in secure and classified work in the Federal government have been exploding and high bandwidth networking options for cluster computing have also been resolved with options such as Infiniband. Development issues have been streamlined with rather nice tools from Apple itself obtained via NeXT. Open standards are being embraced just about everywhere you turn in OS X, a true plug and play environment now exists (I am reminded of the last video card install on my SGI O2 which had me down for two days solid), the GUI is consistent and the CLI is present and fully integrated with the GUI as well. Additionally, more and more networking options are being supported natively within OS X which is one of the last hurdles to true interconnectivity cross platform. And the G5! Oh, the G5 is a wonderful bit of hardware with which to run *NIX on.
Problems that remain are being able to create one seamless environment with shared memory and such, but the rest of the *NIX world is still having those problems as well.
You can argue about the specifics and details of many things, but in terms of a UNIX workstation, OS X pretty much has it all for our needs.
Well, retinal degenerative diseases and remodeling is my forte, but I do recall that red lasers in the 3-5Mw range should cause no retinal damage per se. I qualify that because the long term studies have not been done, only short term studies to my knowledge. The thing you have to remember is that lasers are coherent light that "packs" much more energy into their beam than does say a 200 watt halogen lamp which throws its energy all over the place wasting about 90% of its energy as light. So, as I recall the threshold for damage is 10Xs the acceptable wattage for lasers assuming that people will guard by blinking when exposed to a bright light. (blink time being somewhere about 2/10ths of a second). So, the currently accepted wattage figures on the threshold of immediate tissue damage are in the 30-50Mw range. But you have to remember that the criteria are somewhat vague and no long term studies (to my knowledge) have been done as to the effects on the retina and RPE of brief exposures to low wattage laser light. I might suspect that you could increase your chances for having dry macular degeneration, but that is hazarding a guess.....Regardless, a good rule of thumb is to never stare into a bright light source. (oh, and always invest in good quality sunglasses).
Look. Many things can be made into weapons. In the case of lasers, it is never good to be looking into a laser beam of any wattage especially as the damage to your retina (likely the retinal pigment epithelium initially) may go undetected for years, but could establish a starting off point for macular degeneration. But like the parent said, pump it up 20X in power and you are starting to be able to cause some real damage immediately.
This is almost certainly the case. Even though I had maxed out the RAM on my other systems (to the tune of thousands of $$'s at the time), having more memory certainly does help eliminate the problem of disk thrashing and memory swapping. On the Mac systems for small data-sets, I could enable a RAM disk which sped things up considerably, but for many data-sets, they were too large to fit within the available RAM space. Modern systems can contain much more memory space (8GB/desktop with the G5's) allowing many operations to take place entirely within RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there were plans. This is from a personal conversation I had with one of the principles of Bungie several years ago and a conversation with Glenda Adams of Westlake after that. (I was on the Halo beta test team for OS X.)
I am an OS X user almost exclusively now. However, I base my comment on total licenses, not on desktop licenses. While I believe that in many cases OS X is a superior solution (if not the best option for a desktop OS), I don't think there is any rational person that would make a coherent argument that there are fewer boxes running Linux than there are OS X. Every market survey I have looked at indicated more Linux boxes than OS X boxes. I believe in some areas of markets this is changing but currently.....
Well, I hate to say it but one of the biggest titles coming to Linux was pre-empted from Linux, OS X, and even Windows in favor of the X-box. Yes, eventually it shipped for Windows and OS X, but Linux was left out in the cold when Microsoft purchased Bungie. Bungie had plans for simultaneous release of Halo on Windows and OS X to be followed soon by a Linux release. That all changed when Bungie was bought out. Honestly given the consolidation within the game industry, I don't see much hope for games on Linux for a few years yet which is sort of odd given Linux's marketshare as being so much greater than OS X. Perhaps Toms Hardware is correct when it comes to Linux being a true desktop replacement?
Would you care to define how you are using the term "dimension" here? Has string theory revealed that turtles see in seven dimensions?
No, read up on image math. There is an extensive literature with respect to color vision and color perception. I seem to remember a pretty good website talking about image math and mathematical dimensionality with respect to a great program NIH Image, nee Image J.
Specifically with respect to turtles, they have a number of completely separate image processing channels over and above primate vision whereas we (humans) are limited to three separate channels with one channel piggybacking upon another channel. In fact, one way turtles do this is by placing little oil droplets on the end of their photoreceptors that function as additional spectral filters.
You're either way, way, way beyond me or you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
No offense intended, but I do suspect the former.
Again, what's your point? Human eyes are a subset of the set of every eye's capability? No kidding.
Human eyes are not a subset of every eyes capability. There are eyes for instance that are organized very differently from ours. For example, take a look at the morphology of the octopus eye. Very interesting and effective design and excellent optics, but the octopus retina in completely inverted with respect to the mammalian retina.
I'm also disturbed by your claim that other eyes have been evolving for "longer"....
Well, go back and look at a timeline of evolution. There are organisms whose lineage is much older than the human lineage. Also around the Jurassic period, there was a point at which the common mammalian ancestor went underground and mammalians "lost" their eyes. When they developed again, they did so by co-opting certain visual circuitry and piggybacking the rod pathway on top of the cone pathway. Thus, human eyes (retinas) are evolutionarily "younger" than other retinas in for example zebrafish or amphibians like the salamander or turtle. (did you also know that those organisms can fix their retinas when damaged even though they are more complex than ours?).
which is that improvements aren't free once your reach (near) optimality.
Again, you are making the assumption that human eyes have been optimized to the best they can possibly be. That is an error of thinking because while some things are truly impressive, they are not completely optimal.
This is assuming you don't throw the whole thing out and start anew with inorganic technology, which can probably be made vastly superior with work
Actually, biological photoreceptors are capable of responding to a single photon of light. This is something that inorganic technologies have so far not been able to duplicate without a not insignificant array of hardware that takes up much more space and arguably is not as sensitive or precise as biological photoreceptors.
I hear this line a lot, usually supported by "look, there's this one thing that a dolphin can do as well as a human", completely ignoring the fact that we do much, much, much more than "one thing" well.
You are thinking from truly a egocentric (human centric) viewpoint and not a scientific standpoint. There are capabilities that other organisms have that we are just learning about. Dolphins ability to process information in ultrasound, map their world and even see through things using ultrasound. Elephants communicating in infrasound is another thing that comes to mind.
Humans aren't the best at everything universally, but there is nothing on this planet that even comes close for general purpose cognition.
Use specific language and you will make more sense. Say something like "humans are capable of logical thought and applying reason and strategy to problem solving to greater degree than other known organisms" and I will agree.
I refe
Funny, truly funny.
However, it would have been even funnier if you were a little more subtle about it. Perhaps something like...."Gee, that's not what my parents told me about going blind....that and something about hairy palms."
Mod parent up.
Your subject line might be more appropriate than you think. I am actually concerned about the use of Viagra, because it is a phosphodiesterase inhibitor.......If you read about how photoreceptors work, phosphodiesterase does have a role in the transduction of vision and there is overlap with the activity of Viagra with the phosphodiesterase subtypes found in photoreceptors. Are we setting a bunch of folks up for vision deficits down the road a few years?
Technically and mathematically you are correct. However, what I was referring to is turtles or fish being able to see in two, three or four more dimensions than we currently do. Some organisms can also see polarized light as well.
The curves for those receptors don't completely overlap.
Ah, it depends upon which organism you are referring to. I assume you mean humans and if so, there is considerable overlap in the pigments, especially in the red and green pigments. The blue and green also overlap to some extent.
Of course human eyes aren't a proper superset of every eye's capability in the world.
They are an evolutionary subset of eyes as our eyes evolved later than the other retinas that have had longer to evolve and develop.
But they are quite good for what they do,
That is your perception. If I were to design them anew, I would make the retinas more like other organisms and design the optics using other organisms optima.
There isn't room in one eye for that, and if you did jam it all in you'd be bitching about our crappy resolution!
Actually, you may be surprised at what one could do and how things could be improved.
and the brain behind them is unsurpassed, if you consider seeing not just as raw pixel collection but as understanding the world
Two completely different issues here. Also you should consider that there are some organisms which have specialized portions of their brains that are more sophisticated than ours as well. Humans are not necessarily the best at things you might presume we are.
Nobody else has a visual system that can read.
Well, now you are talking intelligence and interpretation. There is plenty of evidence that suggests the resolution of the image coming out of the retina is plenty good to read in many different organisms from fish, to octopus, to birds, to turtles, to dolphins etc...etc...etc... If you are talking about being able to understand symbolic representation of higher order information, dolphins, gorillas and even octopus can learn to interpret symbology from meaning and their retinas are good enough to resolve finely detailed information.
Artificial eyes will be cool but it's going to be hard to jam any more info down the optic nerve and through the visual system that we already are unless we do a full brain replacement.
Actually, there is plenty of bandwidth available. Where are you getting your information?
There was the Wired article and Slashdot articles about the Wired article talking about a gentleman who has used a system set up by William Dobelle. This system uses a grid of electrodes on the surface of the cortex that generates phosphenes or perceptual points of light. What is not accomplished here is any real correlation with the points of light and the grid of stimulating electrodes. Furthermore, the phosphenes are not consistent among many other problems and potential problems with the Dobelle system. Also, it should be noted that William Dobelle was not granted permission to use this system in the United States and thus had to move to Portugal where he has these systems implanted in patients and he has not been entirely honest with his patients and what they can expect from these systems. Finally, the approach with surface mount electrodes requires significantly higher current to stimulate the cortex (think complications of epilepsy, and his patients have experienced seizures) than with other systems like Richard Normann's system which uses an implantable electrode array.
Yes, and whats ironic is that the sensory overload of modern life is precisely what causes vision loss.
Nonsense. And why yes, I am a vision scientist.
Yeah, believe it or not, that is the compressed version. The native version as it came out of Word (boy that was a serious chore and I hope Apple can do better with their new word processor) was around 769 MB's due to all of the figures. I could prepare another version with lower resolution figures that would be suitable for the web and not publication I suppose, but ever since finishing the dissertation, I have been insanely busy with other work and other publications.
What we are going to need however is 1) a way of understanding how the retina is currently constructed (believe it or not, but after 150 years of study, we still don't know exactly how the circuits in the retina are constructed) and 2) how to interface the new films or chips to the cortex to make sensible visual signals. I am optimistic this can occur but we are still a number of years out.
Perhaps in thirty years we could obtain some degree of enhancement for our eyes that would be optically based. However, a more pressing (and needed) benefit will be a cure or fix for folks with vision loss. "Zoom lenses" and such could relatively easily be accomplished with bionically enhanced optics, but the real trick is going to be designing and implementing the hardware/wetware interface and creating true bionic retinas. Bionic implants for retinal degenerations as currently implemented are not going to work for a variety of reasons (read my doctoral dissertation to find out why), but there are other approaches that can be taken or modifications that will be successful (part of my current work). Also alternative ways of implementing the interface cortically will likely have some success (not my work, but it is of my colleagues). Artificial retinas are going to be harder than artificial cochleas for the hearing impaired or cortical control of motor functions which are both applications that are having some success currently. The retina is a much more complex tissue with (in our eyes) 55-60 different classes of neurons all wired together in a precise manner to generate proper signals for image interpretability. As an interesting aside, I have said this before on Slashdot, but human eyes are pretty pathetic in terms of their sophistication. Birds, fish and many reptiles have much more sophisticated retinas that perceive what we would term a multi-spectral visual world. A visual scene much richer that the simple three-space world we currently see.
Unfortunately, we have decided to STOP selling these lasers to the general public. Too many people have been doing stupid things with lasers recently, and this product is misunderstood. This laser DOES NOT pose a threat to airplanes or pilots
And what do you want to bet they had a visit from their local FBI field office? Purchase records subpoenaed?
It is also interesting to note that even after the introduction of the Lisa and the Macintosh, the Apple IIe was in such demand, it was actually produced up until 1993 for a platform lifetime of the Apple II for seventeen years or so which is an eternity in the desktop computing world.
E.g. Apple "copied" Xerox's and others' earlier work and produced the Mac UI -- which was better than anything that preceded it.
Let me correct you and everybody else on this point. Apple PAID for the GUI in the form of stock which Xerox desperately wanted at the time.
This book seems to leave off when Steve Jobs left after Sculley took over the company and misses the whole revolution that has occurred since then so while the book ends with Macintosh, we really should be considering: Apple II, Macintosh, the new Macintosh (nee OS X) and now iPod.
Perhaps the answer to this question this book asks about lightning striking twice lies in the care and craftsmanship that Apple puts into their products. Like Steve Jobs other companies Pixar and NeXT, there is a substance to Apple's products that tells a story. It goes beyond simple packaging to encompass the whole user experience. With Apple's products, there is considerable effort put into 1) Will this product meet a need and accomplish that goal better than anything else available? 2) Crafting the user experience to optimize their interface with whatever task the product is designed to serve 3) Make sure it does not suck (high praise). If a product does not meet these criteria, it is shelved like so many other projects that never rise to the top at Apple. (like the Palm device and an early effort at co-branding a phone)
The other interesting thing about Apple is the diversity of folks that actually work for them. They prefer to employ folks with advanced degrees, have a significant number of artists and creative folks working there and I seem to remember that one of their product managers was an MD, PhD. So, many of the folks there are creative and are trained to think critically about issues which is reflected in the products Apple creates. The reality with producing great things is that they evolve during development. There is great pain and effort that go into producing significant things and it requires a dedicated team of folks that are brought together by a common vision. Apple (more precisely the people that comprise Apple) are driven by a common passion to create something just that much better than what is available and to create "cool" things that influence how we interact with computers and the data that drives our lives (movies, music, scientific data etc...etc...etc...).
At least in the Atlantic, we have an early warning system for Tsunamis and a well developed system of earthquake monitoring that would likely save many lives on the eastern seaboard. All of those expensive homes up on the coast though......
Ummmm, well how about this?
There is nothing that I talked about in my post that did not take serving up web pages into account. In fact, the standard OS X is robust enough to withstand a Slashdotting on even low end hardware. Witness a little old G3 iMac hosting a vision education resource we have here. This little iMac is running a standard OS X license (not server) and hosts upwards of 45,000 hits per day from all over the world. Not huge traffic, but pretty impressive for a desktop OS and a 400 Mhz G3.
So, what is it you are talking about specifically?
Based upon my experience with IRIX and Solaris (with some Linux), I would have to say that most of the things that *NIX did poorly have been rectified with OS X. I would have said OS X was still lacking true 64bitness, but that is coming in 10.4 rather quickly now. The numbers of Macs involved in secure and classified work in the Federal government have been exploding and high bandwidth networking options for cluster computing have also been resolved with options such as Infiniband. Development issues have been streamlined with rather nice tools from Apple itself obtained via NeXT. Open standards are being embraced just about everywhere you turn in OS X, a true plug and play environment now exists (I am reminded of the last video card install on my SGI O2 which had me down for two days solid), the GUI is consistent and the CLI is present and fully integrated with the GUI as well. Additionally, more and more networking options are being supported natively within OS X which is one of the last hurdles to true interconnectivity cross platform. And the G5! Oh, the G5 is a wonderful bit of hardware with which to run *NIX on.
Problems that remain are being able to create one seamless environment with shared memory and such, but the rest of the *NIX world is still having those problems as well.
You can argue about the specifics and details of many things, but in terms of a UNIX workstation, OS X pretty much has it all for our needs.
Yes, milliwatt not megawatt. :-)
Funny.......truly funny.
Mod parent up!
Well, retinal degenerative diseases and remodeling is my forte, but I do recall that red lasers in the 3-5Mw range should cause no retinal damage per se. I qualify that because the long term studies have not been done, only short term studies to my knowledge. The thing you have to remember is that lasers are coherent light that "packs" much more energy into their beam than does say a 200 watt halogen lamp which throws its energy all over the place wasting about 90% of its energy as light. So, as I recall the threshold for damage is 10Xs the acceptable wattage for lasers assuming that people will guard by blinking when exposed to a bright light. (blink time being somewhere about 2/10ths of a second). So, the currently accepted wattage figures on the threshold of immediate tissue damage are in the 30-50Mw range. But you have to remember that the criteria are somewhat vague and no long term studies (to my knowledge) have been done as to the effects on the retina and RPE of brief exposures to low wattage laser light. I might suspect that you could increase your chances for having dry macular degeneration, but that is hazarding a guess.....Regardless, a good rule of thumb is to never stare into a bright light source. (oh, and always invest in good quality sunglasses).
Mod parent up.
Look. Many things can be made into weapons. In the case of lasers, it is never good to be looking into a laser beam of any wattage especially as the damage to your retina (likely the retinal pigment epithelium initially) may go undetected for years, but could establish a starting off point for macular degeneration. But like the parent said, pump it up 20X in power and you are starting to be able to cause some real damage immediately.
Errr, at Indiana University, by any chance?? With Aaron Kelly?
Nope. U of U. Click on the link.
This is almost certainly the case. Even though I had maxed out the RAM on my other systems (to the tune of thousands of $$'s at the time), having more memory certainly does help eliminate the problem of disk thrashing and memory swapping. On the Mac systems for small data-sets, I could enable a RAM disk which sped things up considerably, but for many data-sets, they were too large to fit within the available RAM space. Modern systems can contain much more memory space (8GB/desktop with the G5's) allowing many operations to take place entirely within RAM.