There's nothing here significantly stronger that what we've had for the last several months. Sure, dual core vs. dual G5 has benefits, but without a clock boost or anything else, it's not much more than packaging.
I would say IBM's offerings are competitive. Steve Jobs and his "wah I wanted a 3GHz chip!" is all bullshit when you look at it; he wanted to compete with the Intel marketing machine, and still hasn't noticed that AMD Opteron chips top out at 2.6GHz - and have done for some time. The G5 is competitive in that it matches or outperforms the AMD Opteron (that frontside bus helps).
Yah, and Apple can have pretty much the same performance with Intel chips. It's not the top end that drove the decision, it's in part the laptop chips. 1.6GHz G5 is good, but the Pentium M looks like the place to be for a while.
Ultimately, I suspect its Intel DRM that drove the decision. If the media giants want DRM, they're going to go with Intels, and anyone else is going to have a uphill fight. Better to be in the game from the start there.
Their dual cores top out at 2.2GHz and also probably will for some time. Apple still have the potential to create a 2.4GHz PowerMac and an XServe with up to 4 processors which competes with AMD's most expensive and little used 400 and 800 processor lines.
Apple has always been able to do 4-way with the G5. Dual dual-core isn't *that* much easier than 4-way. If the market was there for 4-way we'd have it.
I don't see why it "illustrates" anything except that Steve Jobs is a nut job who lied himself through a developer conference. It's a damn shame Apple has gone so low and a damn shame the developers are so loyal that they keep so quiet.
How did he lie? Everybody knew about the MP before the conference. The transition lasts until 2007. The decision surely wasn't made based on any product that will ship between now and then. In fact, the MP is likely the main reason why the PowerMacs will be last to move - the performance is there with PPC in the near term. Will IBM make a 980, though, or is this the end of the line?
There is a lot of dissent in private quarters. All that PowerPC hype Apple pushed down our throats - some of it actually real as it turned out - has left 1000s of developers with a lot of AltiVec code and not a lot of choice. They are mighty pissed about rewriting their apps again, especially to bridge the gap between now and the 10 years in the future that Steve's Intel Roadmap says they will have better integer performance.
Oh, come on. There aren't 1000s of Altivec apps. There are thousands of apps using Apple's SIMD libraries (which are already ported to SSE3) and using other OS X libraries, but there are *maybe* hundreds of apps using Altivec directly. Apple isn't worried about them being pissed. Developers will chase the money like everyone else and Apple isn't a bad ride right now. They'll suck it up, diddle their code and start selling product again.
The biggest dissent seems to be inside IBM. Not long after the 970 came out IBM merged their semiconductor and server groups. The semiconductor group that was quietly making small profits (due to low pricing to Apple) on 970s was publicly costing the server group big profits by taking a bunch of HPC contracts that could have gone to IBM 970 or POWER systems (IBM execs would of course claim that every Apple HPC sale was a lost IBM server sale since it was the CPU that carried the day).
Once those groups merged, Apple's sweet deals went away and Apple was expected to pay their way. The contract came up, Apple didn't want to pay the enormous development costs of a CPU line, so they saw their opportunity to further commoditize the product line and struck a deal with Intel. In the end, consumers and most developers really won't have a problem, and it *might* (who really knows) portend good things for Apple.
Why is IBM unvailing it now? There are no known potential customers for this chip.
Well, IBM is a customer as will be Apple. The PowerMacs aren't planned to dump PPC for another 18 months, so you should see dual-core PowerMacs for some time here.
This announcement also helps illustrate why Apple jumped - 2.5GHz at the high-end means that Apple remains topped out on performance, and the low-power chips are okay, but really aren't low-power enough, nor fast enough to give Apple a significant gain on laptops.
You do it to spread fear and get your enemy to do stupid things, not to "win".
Which only underscores their stupidity. Of all US/UK cities to bomb, London would have to be the least productive. If Hitler continuously running bombers and rockets over the channel killing 60,000 and destroying 2 million homes couldn't get the Brits to act stupidly then Al Qaeda doesn't stand a chance with that lot.
Hearts and minds to all in London today. Chin up. Show 'em what you're made of.
I just set up an email account for my son, 7, so he can send mail to his grandparents and practice typing. He's got a nice gmail account and the Mac OS X parental controls whitelists who he can send and receive mail from. Any other addresses that go to his account or that he tries to send to are forwarded to me so I can add them to the list if I see fit.
Safari similarly limits the websites he can go to so he can't go directly to gmail to bypass the whitelist.
Government doesn't need to protect kids from spammers. We're all perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. The problem is that most people really don't care - they say they care but they don't care enough to act - to spend $20 on software that will do what this bill does, or to spend an hour learning how to secure their kids machine.
Did you miss the part about how he works for a school? He has to get the money before it can be invested, and $100 might be the limit above which he has to get the approval of 3 PHBs and 6 beancounters.
Or maybe you missed the part about how the attacks are coming from other departments, over which he has no authority, and who obviously don't place a high value on security?
I work at a university, so I know the game.
I would recharge the other department $50 for 'security services' each IP they fail to protect that touches my box. Include a printout of the log proving it's their box.
Either of two things will happen:
1) They'll pay up because they aren't paying attention. 2) They'll bitch like hell at your boss which will cause him/her to approve the budget request, or will get him/her to move up the food chain and get the funds from a common source.
Either way, the money shows up, the problem gets solved. In fact, it'll probably also solve the zombie problem by bringing such high attention to it.
"That's the handy thing abou tmaking applications really directories in hiding."
You are thinking of appliation bundles, which while very handy, have nothing to do with universal binaries.
Universal binaries exist entirely outside of application bundles which is why you can have universal binaries of command line tools - cp, ls, etc. Universal binaries simply exploit the ability to manipulate the entry address for executable code and branch appropriately.
At least, that's my understanding of the issue based on a presentation given by someone who sits on the board in Texas and was attempting to clarify the issue.
You have it right. It is vague and in some states 'engineer' is enough to get the attention of the labor board and the local NSPE. California not too long ago went through this with Cisco calling everyone engineers.
But more importantly, most programmers simply aren't engineers by training. Many programs don't cover the professional elements of safety, reliability, economics, and so on. The reason the Texas board is speaking is they're the first state to offer licensure for Software Engineering.
Why does Apple not realize that they would be doing themselves a favor if they didn't act like their product is 'holier than thou'? I mean, if it were priced below M$ and ran on x86 machines, it would eventually win.
Seriously, don't they realize that selling cheaper sometimes means bigger profits?
Yeah, BMW is so lame because they're too stupid to realize if they just priced their cars below Kia, they'd make a killing.
Most consumers are okay with the fact that you need to spend money on things. The goal is NOT to spend as little as possible - if that were true, we'd all live in single-wides and drive Yugos. The goal is to get as much value (however you individually measure that) for the money.
Me, I drive 3 miles to work. I don't give a shit what my car looks like so long as I get to work on time so BMW has no value for me. My wife and kids spend a lot more time in our other car and I don't *at all* mind spending money to ensure that they have one which is safe/reliable/comfortable/easy to drive, etc.
Price *only* becomes the major buying factor when the product is fungible - gas, carrots, electricity, RAM, and so on. The PC market is suprisingly close to a fungible market right now to most consumers which is why average selling price keeps dropping - if the Dell and the HP are otherwise the same, buy what's cheapest. As soon as feature differentiation is possible and desirable, then price starts to quickly fall down the list for most buyers.
Many consumers don't care about feature differentiation in PCs - they want to plug it in and make it go and not much beyond that matters. I don't care about feature differntiation in gas - I don't buy premium or ultra, so even though it's there, my bottom line is price. Others care about that so they pay extra to get it.
So Apple's product is holier than thou because BMWs is and Mercs is Lexus and a host of others. It's about differentiating the product and figuring out how much more people will pay for that. More than anything, people haven't cared about the differentiation that Apple offers so they aren't willing to pay *anything* for it. In fact, most consumers right now aren't even willing to pay *less* for Apple's differentiation.
We need to see how Apple works their way from here.
The one thing that the PPC->x86 move shows is that Apple Is Not Serious About The Server Market.
For servers, anyone could just as easily run Darwin, or Linux, or BSD, on their favorite x86 server platform. The xServe was pretty cool, but there's really nothing compelling there from an OS X standpoint.
Well, OS X Server is a rather nicely assembled server OS with acceptable (that is, intuitive) admin tools. But that aside, what makes you think that Apple is not serious about the server market. Do you think that OS X PPC will stop working with this move? Do you realize that Apple could with an almost trivial amount of work have OS X running on POWER hardware? It is believed that OS X already runs on Itanium in the labs. It is likely that Apple have kept up the SPARC tree as well.
While I agree that OS X is not a strong server OS beyond its ability to easily serve up OS X clients, hardware independence and options are something that is valued in the server space, and it's something that Apple can do quite well. No, not Linux or BSD well, but far, far better than Windows can.
So, this move says nothing about Apple's server intentions. We need to see what happens probably in 2007 before a declaration can be made. I would not be surprised in the least to see a resurgent Itanium move by Intel be matched with a ready-to-roll version of OS X Server that delivers developers generally with a one-click recompile.
There's a pattern of behavior that you can see in many parts of American society (probably others as well). Normal people will on occassion knowingly break the law - even organize for the task - if it appears that the broader group disagrees with the laws intent.
For example, farmers in low-yield areas often grow a little pot behind the barn to make the mortage. It's a shared secret among all the farmers - they often all do it in a bad year - but any moves by the sherriff to crack down on the behavior will result in a swift voting out in the next election. The farmers know it's illegal, but the don't believe it's wrong in the greater scheme.
Apple's problem is that for the next 6-12 months at least, and maybe longer, depending on perceptions, Mac OS X for x86 will exist, but cannot be bought. The product itself is not illegal or dangerous. Normal people will start to pirate it, easily making the rationalization that they'd buy it if they could. See music downloads and movie/tv downloads as precedents of this behavior.
Even when x86 Macs start shipping, the problem may continue because you can't run OS X on any ol' PC, so cracked and pirated versions may continue.
So regardless of whether Apple wants it, or thinks it will benefit them, they've created a condition where there is no question that normally rule-abiding people will pirate it. Surely they realize this - they're not stupid.
Unless it's applied, most higher math doesn't require a calculator
I couldn't disagree more. I have a BS in mathematics and the more math I do, the more I need a calculator. Why? Very simple - as one gets into higher math and begins to think more abstractly, one wants to worry less and less about numbers.
While many mathematicians don't need them becuase they have gotten very good at arithmetic, this isn't true of all of us. I'm laughably bad at arithmetic and have struggled with it most of my life. But calculators let me overcome that.
Saying that mathematics doesn't need calculators because they should be able to do it by hand is like saying astronomers don't need automatic telescopes because they should be able to observe by hand.
But you're not *learning* math when you need your calculator. You're just solving a problem.
I have a B.S. in math as well, and there wasn't a single time that I needed a calculator learning math. I also have a B.S. in physics and a lot of the time I didn't need a calculator then either. In fact, I had physics instructors that would deliberately give out problems that would overload calculators of the time to reinforce the basic algebraic solutions to the problems. Turns out solving the problem algebraically often times is faster than punching in the numbers and you always get a more accurate answer - no rounding.
So, astronomers don't need automatic telescopes to LEARN astronomy, only to make it faster when they need to do it. But they damn well better know how to track a star if the damn thing breaks.
Calculators don't let you get past the first stage of learning - basic resitation of facts: 88 * 112 = 9856. It doesn't allow you to understand what is at work there, to see different ways of solving the problem, to teach others, to develop new ways of doing it. How many calculator students would know to just turn that into (100 -12) * (100 + 12) which is easy to do in your head if you recognize that it solves as 100*100 - 12*12? The arithmetic you've known since 2nd grade and the algebra since 8th grade, but anything much beyond 12*12 and even a lot of 800 SAT winners will reach for their HP.
The problem for even mathematicians is that the calculators make us lazy too. While we're caught up in differential geometry, we start to forget how easy it is to spot a middle-school math problem.
No, basically it's a test that ensures that a browser won't take invalid CSS and try to render it (usually according to it's own rules).
As much as we need IE to render valid CSS consistently, we also need it to NOT render invalid CSS as if it were valid - otherwise the world will yet again write to IE's quirks for their own gain.
I found that Texas derives only 7% of its electricity from "green" sources (I'm including nuclear in that number), with the remaining coming from coal, natural gas, petroleum (61%), and "dual fired" (what's that? Is that "green?") (32%).
Dual-fired is a little bit green. Basically the power is derived from burning a mix of a traditional fossil-fuel such as oil or natural gas and convicted felons - rapists, multiple murders, that kind of thing. It's a cornerstone of Bush's energy plan.
GP: "You make nude photos of yourself then sorry, if they get posted somewhere its only your own fault and nobody else."
P: No, if someone steals your property it is the perpetrators fault.
This is an IP violation, not a property case. How is this any different than: "You make a feature film then sorry, if it gets posted somewhere it's your own fault and nobody else"
Collectively, I don't think that the/. crowd would agree with the viewpoints of either the P or GP posts if this was RotS or the new NIN CD, yet change the content somewhat and suddenly new rationale come out.
Q: If I opened an account with Yahoo and posted RotS claiming I not only held IP but was Lucas and Yahoo rebuffed his attempts at closing the account, would Lucas have the right to sue Yahoo? Who would have the rights to sue me?
Of course not much of the above really applies here. The woman doesn't own IP on the photos - she didn't take them, he did. She no more owns the IP than I do of my 3rd grade class photo. The real issue here is the fraud/identity theft charge. The photos I think will be found to be totally irrelevant.
Rule #1: If you don't want nude photos/sex tapes of yourself shared with the whole world, your *only* protection is to never have them taken, plain and simple.
If I had to guess, I would bet that Apple is stalling until they can get a software reconfigurable radio in there so that they aren't tied to either XM or Sirius. They don't need to cover the whole spectrum, just those two.
Apple's history suggests that they don't like tying their hardware fate to that of one other company. They won't ink a deal with Sirius unless they can convert that into a deal with XM. Remember, it's in Apple's best interest to create the product with the user in mind - and no consumer wants their network choice to be influenced by the hardware they buy.
That way Apple gets to keep both XM and Sirius from undercutting their hardware market and Apple can use each as leverage against the other. Oh, and the profit-sharing deal is simple - Apple gets all the hardware profits, the other company gets their subscription, and the user gets a free x months, courtesy of the network.
This benefits the networks FAR more than Apple, and Steve will make that clear in no uncertain terms.
Speech interfaces, project data on any wall. Don't have a wall? Ask it to create a wall. Project any graph. Don't have a graph? Ask it to create a graph. Not enough seating locally? Ask it to create some new seats. Problem solved.
Let me know when it's done. I'll pay you to install one where I work too.
Re:Which scenario makes more sense?
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Tinfoil Hat House
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· Score: 1
Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to live in any city in that state.
Don't worry. It's a near certainty that nobody can pay you enough to afford to live in any city in this state.
Doesn't this result in the same sort of cat/buttered toast perpetual motion machine? I would imagine the centripedal forces of such a device would inhibit conception.
Well, I can see Dell introducing a new line of computers with cases large enough to preload a Gibson guitar, or perhaps a 399 piece Craftsman socket set.
Too bad my Powermatic saw was one of the last of their products made in the US - an Apple PowerMac G5 with integrated 13" surface planer could be dang handy...
FYI, the Mac mini can barely play back 720p and averages 10-20 fps and in no way can encode 720p at better than a couple of frames per second or thereabouts. h.264 is extremely processor intensive.
A mini can drive a modest h.264 video chat through iChat, but don't worry about the 720p camera, just get an iSight.
We'll either need way more CPU horsepower than even the dual G5s deliver for real-time HD encoding or, more likely, wait for either hardware encoding in the box or on the camera itself.
There is already some h.264 hardware video surveillance gear showing up, but nothing consumer level, AFAIK.
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How are they "topped out for performance"?
There's nothing here significantly stronger that what we've had for the last several months. Sure, dual core vs. dual G5 has benefits, but without a clock boost or anything else, it's not much more than packaging.
I would say IBM's offerings are competitive. Steve Jobs and his "wah I wanted a 3GHz chip!" is all bullshit when you look at it; he wanted to compete with the Intel marketing machine, and still hasn't noticed that AMD Opteron chips top out at 2.6GHz - and have done for some time. The G5 is competitive in that it matches or outperforms the AMD Opteron (that frontside bus helps).
Yah, and Apple can have pretty much the same performance with Intel chips. It's not the top end that drove the decision, it's in part the laptop chips. 1.6GHz G5 is good, but the Pentium M looks like the place to be for a while.
Ultimately, I suspect its Intel DRM that drove the decision. If the media giants want DRM, they're going to go with Intels, and anyone else is going to have a uphill fight. Better to be in the game from the start there.
Their dual cores top out at 2.2GHz and also probably will for some time. Apple still have the potential to create a 2.4GHz PowerMac and an XServe with up to 4 processors which competes with AMD's most expensive and little used 400 and 800 processor lines.
Apple has always been able to do 4-way with the G5. Dual dual-core isn't *that* much easier than 4-way. If the market was there for 4-way we'd have it.
I don't see why it "illustrates" anything except that Steve Jobs is a nut job who lied himself through a developer conference. It's a damn shame Apple has gone so low and a damn shame the developers are so loyal that they keep so quiet.
How did he lie? Everybody knew about the MP before the conference. The transition lasts until 2007. The decision surely wasn't made based on any product that will ship between now and then. In fact, the MP is likely the main reason why the PowerMacs will be last to move - the performance is there with PPC in the near term. Will IBM make a 980, though, or is this the end of the line?
There is a lot of dissent in private quarters. All that PowerPC hype Apple pushed down our throats - some of it actually real as it turned out - has left 1000s of developers with a lot of AltiVec code and not a lot of choice. They are mighty
pissed about rewriting their apps again, especially to bridge the gap between now and the 10 years in the future that Steve's Intel Roadmap says they will have better integer performance.
Oh, come on. There aren't 1000s of Altivec apps. There are thousands of apps using Apple's SIMD libraries (which are already ported to SSE3) and using other OS X libraries, but there are *maybe* hundreds of apps using Altivec directly. Apple isn't worried about them being pissed. Developers will chase the money like everyone else and Apple isn't a bad ride right now. They'll suck it up, diddle their code and start selling product again.
The biggest dissent seems to be inside IBM. Not long after the 970 came out IBM merged their semiconductor and server groups. The semiconductor group that was quietly making small profits (due to low pricing to Apple) on 970s was publicly costing the server group big profits by taking a bunch of HPC contracts that could have gone to IBM 970 or POWER systems (IBM execs would of course claim that every Apple HPC sale was a lost IBM server sale since it was the CPU that carried the day).
Once those groups merged, Apple's sweet deals went away and Apple was expected to pay their way. The contract came up, Apple didn't want to pay the enormous development costs of a CPU line, so they saw their opportunity to further commoditize the product line and struck a deal with Intel. In the end, consumers and most developers really won't have a problem, and it *might* (who really knows) portend good things for Apple.
Why is IBM unvailing it now? There are no known potential customers for this chip.
Well, IBM is a customer as will be Apple. The PowerMacs aren't planned to dump PPC for another 18 months, so you should see dual-core PowerMacs for some time here.
This announcement also helps illustrate why Apple jumped - 2.5GHz at the high-end means that Apple remains topped out on performance, and the low-power chips are okay, but really aren't low-power enough, nor fast enough to give Apple a significant gain on laptops.
You do it to spread fear and get your enemy to do stupid things, not to "win".
Which only underscores their stupidity. Of all US/UK cities to bomb, London would have to be the least productive. If Hitler continuously running bombers and rockets over the channel killing 60,000 and destroying 2 million homes couldn't get the Brits to act stupidly then Al Qaeda doesn't stand a chance with that lot.
Hearts and minds to all in London today. Chin up. Show 'em what you're made of.
Agreed.
I just set up an email account for my son, 7, so he can send mail to his grandparents and practice typing. He's got a nice gmail account and the Mac OS X parental controls whitelists who he can send and receive mail from. Any other addresses that go to his account or that he tries to send to are forwarded to me so I can add them to the list if I see fit.
Safari similarly limits the websites he can go to so he can't go directly to gmail to bypass the whitelist.
Government doesn't need to protect kids from spammers. We're all perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. The problem is that most people really don't care - they say they care but they don't care enough to act - to spend $20 on software that will do what this bill does, or to spend an hour learning how to secure their kids machine.
Did you miss the part about how he works for a school? He has to get the money before it can be invested, and $100 might be the limit above which he has to get the approval of 3 PHBs and 6 beancounters.
Or maybe you missed the part about how the attacks are coming from other departments, over which he has no authority, and who obviously don't place a high value on security?
I work at a university, so I know the game.
I would recharge the other department $50 for 'security services' each IP they fail to protect that touches my box. Include a printout of the log proving it's their box.
Either of two things will happen:
1) They'll pay up because they aren't paying attention.
2) They'll bitch like hell at your boss which will cause him/her to approve the budget request, or will get him/her to move up the food chain and get the funds from a common source.
Either way, the money shows up, the problem gets solved. In fact, it'll probably also solve the zombie problem by bringing such high attention to it.
What was it called? Atrac or something like that?
It's 'AssTrack'. Do your homework next time, please.
"That's the handy thing abou tmaking applications really directories in hiding."
You are thinking of appliation bundles, which while very handy, have nothing to do with universal binaries.
Universal binaries exist entirely outside of application bundles which is why you can have universal binaries of command line tools - cp, ls, etc. Universal binaries simply exploit the ability to manipulate the entry address for executable code and branch appropriately.
Isn't this just command-line XML-RPC?
Why not simply build a command line tool that leverages what developers have already in place?
It is in Texas.
t m
http://www.computer.org/software/articles/Speed.h
At least, that's my understanding of the issue based on a presentation given by someone who sits on the board in Texas and was attempting to clarify the issue.
You have it right. It is vague and in some states 'engineer' is enough to get the attention of the labor board and the local NSPE. California not too long ago went through this with Cisco calling everyone engineers.
But more importantly, most programmers simply aren't engineers by training. Many programs don't cover the professional elements of safety, reliability, economics, and so on. The reason the Texas board is speaking is they're the first state to offer licensure for Software Engineering.
Why does Apple not realize that they would be doing themselves a favor if they didn't act like their product is 'holier than thou'? I mean, if it were priced below M$ and ran on x86 machines, it would eventually win.
Seriously, don't they realize that selling cheaper sometimes means bigger profits?
Yeah, BMW is so lame because they're too stupid to realize if they just priced their cars below Kia, they'd make a killing.
Most consumers are okay with the fact that you need to spend money on things. The goal is NOT to spend as little as possible - if that were true, we'd all live in single-wides and drive Yugos. The goal is to get as much value (however you individually measure that) for the money.
Me, I drive 3 miles to work. I don't give a shit what my car looks like so long as I get to work on time so BMW has no value for me. My wife and kids spend a lot more time in our other car and I don't *at all* mind spending money to ensure that they have one which is safe/reliable/comfortable/easy to drive, etc.
Price *only* becomes the major buying factor when the product is fungible - gas, carrots, electricity, RAM, and so on. The PC market is suprisingly close to a fungible market right now to most consumers which is why average selling price keeps dropping - if the Dell and the HP are otherwise the same, buy what's cheapest. As soon as feature differentiation is possible and desirable, then price starts to quickly fall down the list for most buyers.
Many consumers don't care about feature differentiation in PCs - they want to plug it in and make it go and not much beyond that matters. I don't care about feature differntiation in gas - I don't buy premium or ultra, so even though it's there, my bottom line is price. Others care about that so they pay extra to get it.
So Apple's product is holier than thou because BMWs is and Mercs is Lexus and a host of others. It's about differentiating the product and figuring out how much more people will pay for that. More than anything, people haven't cared about the differentiation that Apple offers so they aren't willing to pay *anything* for it. In fact, most consumers right now aren't even willing to pay *less* for Apple's differentiation.
We need to see how Apple works their way from here.
Hmm.. That's weird. Every time I move my mouse while talking on the phone, the person on the other end sounds like Satan.
You mean people on the phone don't normally sound like Satan? Well, people in general, really?
The one thing that the PPC->x86 move shows is that Apple Is Not Serious About The Server Market.
For servers, anyone could just as easily run Darwin, or Linux, or BSD, on their favorite x86 server platform. The xServe was pretty cool, but there's really nothing compelling there from an OS X standpoint.
Well, OS X Server is a rather nicely assembled server OS with acceptable (that is, intuitive) admin tools. But that aside, what makes you think that Apple is not serious about the server market. Do you think that OS X PPC will stop working with this move? Do you realize that Apple could with an almost trivial amount of work have OS X running on POWER hardware? It is believed that OS X already runs on Itanium in the labs. It is likely that Apple have kept up the SPARC tree as well.
While I agree that OS X is not a strong server OS beyond its ability to easily serve up OS X clients, hardware independence and options are something that is valued in the server space, and it's something that Apple can do quite well. No, not Linux or BSD well, but far, far better than Windows can.
So, this move says nothing about Apple's server intentions. We need to see what happens probably in 2007 before a declaration can be made. I would not be surprised in the least to see a resurgent Itanium move by Intel be matched with a ready-to-roll version of OS X Server that delivers developers generally with a one-click recompile.
There's a pattern of behavior that you can see in many parts of American society (probably others as well). Normal people will on occassion knowingly break the law - even organize for the task - if it appears that the broader group disagrees with the laws intent.
For example, farmers in low-yield areas often grow a little pot behind the barn to make the mortage. It's a shared secret among all the farmers - they often all do it in a bad year - but any moves by the sherriff to crack down on the behavior will result in a swift voting out in the next election. The farmers know it's illegal, but the don't believe it's wrong in the greater scheme.
Apple's problem is that for the next 6-12 months at least, and maybe longer, depending on perceptions, Mac OS X for x86 will exist, but cannot be bought. The product itself is not illegal or dangerous. Normal people will start to pirate it, easily making the rationalization that they'd buy it if they could. See music downloads and movie/tv downloads as precedents of this behavior.
Even when x86 Macs start shipping, the problem may continue because you can't run OS X on any ol' PC, so cracked and pirated versions may continue.
So regardless of whether Apple wants it, or thinks it will benefit them, they've created a condition where there is no question that normally rule-abiding people will pirate it. Surely they realize this - they're not stupid.
Unless it's applied, most higher math doesn't require a calculator
I couldn't disagree more. I have a BS in mathematics and the more math I do, the more I need a calculator. Why? Very simple - as one gets into higher math and begins to think more abstractly, one wants to worry less and less about numbers.
While many mathematicians don't need them becuase they have gotten very good at arithmetic, this isn't true of all of us. I'm laughably bad at arithmetic and have struggled with it most of my life. But calculators let me overcome that.
Saying that mathematics doesn't need calculators because they should be able to do it by hand is like saying astronomers don't need automatic telescopes because they should be able to observe by hand.
But you're not *learning* math when you need your calculator. You're just solving a problem.
I have a B.S. in math as well, and there wasn't a single time that I needed a calculator learning math. I also have a B.S. in physics and a lot of the time I didn't need a calculator then either. In fact, I had physics instructors that would deliberately give out problems that would overload calculators of the time to reinforce the basic algebraic solutions to the problems. Turns out solving the problem algebraically often times is faster than punching in the numbers and you always get a more accurate answer - no rounding.
So, astronomers don't need automatic telescopes to LEARN astronomy, only to make it faster when they need to do it. But they damn well better know how to track a star if the damn thing breaks.
Calculators don't let you get past the first stage of learning - basic resitation of facts: 88 * 112 = 9856. It doesn't allow you to understand what is at work there, to see different ways of solving the problem, to teach others, to develop new ways of doing it. How many calculator students would know to just turn that into (100 -12) * (100 + 12) which is easy to do in your head if you recognize that it solves as 100*100 - 12*12? The arithmetic you've known since 2nd grade and the algebra since 8th grade, but anything much beyond 12*12 and even a lot of 800 SAT winners will reach for their HP.
The problem for even mathematicians is that the calculators make us lazy too. While we're caught up in differential geometry, we start to forget how easy it is to spot a middle-school math problem.
No, basically it's a test that ensures that a browser won't take invalid CSS and try to render it (usually according to it's own rules).
As much as we need IE to render valid CSS consistently, we also need it to NOT render invalid CSS as if it were valid - otherwise the world will yet again write to IE's quirks for their own gain.
I found that Texas derives only 7% of its electricity from "green" sources (I'm including nuclear in that number), with the remaining coming from coal, natural gas, petroleum (61%), and "dual fired" (what's that? Is that "green?") (32%).
Dual-fired is a little bit green. Basically the power is derived from burning a mix of a traditional fossil-fuel such as oil or natural gas and convicted felons - rapists, multiple murders, that kind of thing. It's a cornerstone of Bush's energy plan.
GP: "You make nude photos of yourself then sorry, if they get posted somewhere its only your own fault and nobody else."
/. crowd would agree with the viewpoints of either the P or GP posts if this was RotS or the new NIN CD, yet change the content somewhat and suddenly new rationale come out.
P: No, if someone steals your property it is the perpetrators fault.
This is an IP violation, not a property case. How is this any different than: "You make a feature film then sorry, if it gets posted somewhere it's your own fault and nobody else"
Collectively, I don't think that the
Q: If I opened an account with Yahoo and posted RotS claiming I not only held IP but was Lucas and Yahoo rebuffed his attempts at closing the account, would Lucas have the right to sue Yahoo? Who would have the rights to sue me?
Of course not much of the above really applies here. The woman doesn't own IP on the photos - she didn't take them, he did. She no more owns the IP than I do of my 3rd grade class photo. The real issue here is the fraud/identity theft charge. The photos I think will be found to be totally irrelevant.
Rule #1: If you don't want nude photos/sex tapes of yourself shared with the whole world, your *only* protection is to never have them taken, plain and simple.
If I had to guess, I would bet that Apple is stalling until they can get a software reconfigurable radio in there so that they aren't tied to either XM or Sirius. They don't need to cover the whole spectrum, just those two.
Apple's history suggests that they don't like tying their hardware fate to that of one other company. They won't ink a deal with Sirius unless they can convert that into a deal with XM. Remember, it's in Apple's best interest to create the product with the user in mind - and no consumer wants their network choice to be influenced by the hardware they buy.
That way Apple gets to keep both XM and Sirius from undercutting their hardware market and Apple can use each as leverage against the other. Oh, and the profit-sharing deal is simple - Apple gets all the hardware profits, the other company gets their subscription, and the user gets a free x months, courtesy of the network.
This benefits the networks FAR more than Apple, and Steve will make that clear in no uncertain terms.
Just invent the holodeck.
Speech interfaces, project data on any wall. Don't have a wall? Ask it to create a wall. Project any graph. Don't have a graph? Ask it to create a graph. Not enough seating locally? Ask it to create some new seats. Problem solved.
Let me know when it's done. I'll pay you to install one where I work too.
Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to live in any city in that state.
Don't worry. It's a near certainty that nobody can pay you enough to afford to live in any city in this state.
Doesn't this result in the same sort of cat/buttered toast perpetual motion machine? I would imagine the centripedal forces of such a device would inhibit conception.
Well, I can see Dell introducing a new line of computers with cases large enough to preload a Gibson guitar, or perhaps a 399 piece Craftsman socket set.
Too bad my Powermatic saw was one of the last of their products made in the US - an Apple PowerMac G5 with integrated 13" surface planer could be dang handy...
FYI, the Mac mini can barely play back 720p and averages 10-20 fps and in no way can encode 720p at better than a couple of frames per second or thereabouts. h.264 is extremely processor intensive.
A mini can drive a modest h.264 video chat through iChat, but don't worry about the 720p camera, just get an iSight.
We'll either need way more CPU horsepower than even the dual G5s deliver for real-time HD encoding or, more likely, wait for either hardware encoding in the box or on the camera itself.
There is already some h.264 hardware video surveillance gear showing up, but nothing consumer level, AFAIK.
Technical translation:
means to generate power: rowing machine
diagnostic safety system: Longhorn
Going OTS will save billions on the budget.