I was watching my teenage brother-in-law play Zelda (I don't recall which) on his gamecube the other day. The graphical style of the game was very effective, and I think it would actually lose appeal going to higher resolution.
Now all you experts can respond and tell me why I'm totally wrong.
No, gameplay can be quite independent of resolution quality. In fact the earlier games were often good because they had to make the gameplay good. The graphics were never going to impress anyone.
All too often now a game gets released with really good graphics, but its still a crap game. Its easier to get a team to paint pixels than it is to get an innovative play line.
But that doesn't mean that graphics destroy a game. They just are used to hide a bad one....
Michael
Its the support costs that are interesting
on
Oracle Linux Explored
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· Score: 5, Insightful
To quote the web article:
Unusually, Oracle are claiming that they will support your operating system indefinitely as part of the Premier Support package which works out at $1199 and $1999.
These lifetime models get pretty interesting - you don't know if they are financially viable until a few years have gone by.
But I've seen a few health clubs, airlines and government pension plans so on, suffer on the weight of their liabilities such as lifetime memberships, lifetime frequent flyer points, a unfunded retirement pensions.
That is actually a big risk over a 10 year period..
I've been thinking/dithering about getting a MacBook but I cycle a lot. Will it fit into a standard sized pannier, or do you need some custom carrying accessory?
I use standard panniers, but put my laptop and its accessories into a laptop shoulder bag. Its actually a 12" one, which just happened to be long enough to hold the widescreen, as the 13.3 inch laptop is basically the same height as a 12" powerbook, but as wide as the 14" ibook.
I speak with no authority on this one, but I'd be putting it in some sort of padding just in case. The HDD will probably survive the trip without if its off or powered down, but why take a chance? Things can get bumpy and a padded case is worthwhile at the end of the trip anyway - I have all the other bits to go with it (display adaptors, etc) so I want something to pick up out of the pannier at the other end.
I'm just using the pannier to hold it on the side of the bike and keep it dry if it rains; so the double bag effect is a good idea anyway (and I usually don't power my laptop for the trip, I just shut the lid).
Hope this helps - anyway, this setup basically works for me.
Apple did borrow a winning strategy from Microsoft in keeping its technology proprietary. [Emphasis mine] Suffice to say, even the slickest market campaign can't account alone for iPod's success; just look at the PS3 or Zune: you can't pull the wool over everyone's eyes all the time.
Perhaps more importantly, if apple has the patent, microsoft doesn't
It might be more of a blocking exercise than anything else - apple has a perfectly good model for sales, and might just be doing this to prevent other models from happening.
It's both good and bad that IE7 may be, in a sense, a wildcard. For one, it's good because those not running XP may switch to Firefox, as Kelson mentioned. The bad part is not that the masses who will use it will get a bad internet experience: IE7 should be fine for most people's internet needs (and wants). It's the fact that once the masses continue to take up IE7, Microsoft's potential whims on HTML code, and especially CSS, will have to become normal or else many will *gasp* become inconvenienced.
Actually, its the growth in apple, plus a bit of linux, plus win 2k/98, etc that will drive things the other way.
Firefox is the only single browser that runs everwhere. Easier to develop your website on that; once IE drops below 80% Firefox starts to get very attractive as an option.
Apple no longer offers any 7200 rpm drive in the 15" MacBook Pros, at any capacity. It's not standard, and it's not offered as an option. The only place it's still available is in the 17" model.
I stand corrected - I did check the store, but missed that it was missing as an option on the 15"
My apologies - I generally do check what I write pretty carefully before I hit the "submit" button....
I don't know why, but its a bit sad - especially on the Pro models - not because its critical in itself, but because its so much more of a pain to change the HDD on the Pro than it is on the MacBook. And there is no reason for Apple not to offer this - after all, its a PRO laptop.
Maybe it's just me, but this is the first I've heard of 2,5" HDs > 120 Gb... I'm sure they've been around a while; I'm pretty sure 100GB was around when I upgraded my notebook from a 20GB drive to 60GB last year.
They have been around for a while.
I'm typing this on my factory fitted MacBook (not PRO) with 2GB RAM and 120 GB HDD.
Even 6 months ago this was an option on the macbook.
I just wish that they would let me spec out the MacBook better than this... For some reason Apple seems to think that the only people who want a powerful laptop want a large, powerful laptop.
I don't care if the case is white, black or metal terribly much, but I find the 13.3 inch MacBook a step down in portability from my 12 inch powerbook.
If you ride a bicycle to work, or fly on planes alot, you really want a small laptop.
Unfortunately, they eliminated the option for a 7200 rpm drive. It's a significant performance hit, if you're doing something that's I/O bound on the hard drive.
You can get a 7200 rpm drive, its not a standard but its an option. But you have to drop down to 100GB. I think this reflects the manufacturers.
Bear in mind that the 160 GB drives use perpendicular recording, so they increase the size by increasing the areal density of the data.
This also means that for a given speed of rotation, it will increase the data rates quite alot.
Seek times won't be helped by this increase in density however.
Also not mentioned is that 2gigs has been made the standard memory size with 1gig only available in the lowest model, with a 3gig option on the 17in version.
The 15 inch can go to 3gig too, just not a standard configuration
2 GB of RAM? How about a 500 Mb Photoshop file (NOT uncommon in the prepress industry), 1 undo, cut-and-paste. Swap. -G
Yes, that would be fair, that might go to swap on my laptop.
I'd definitely use a desktop for that - and now you are talking about commercial stuff.
A MacPro goes to 16GB. That would give you a few undo's.....
Point is, you are right, you can force a modern machine to swap. Its not that hard to do if you want to try.
But you can generally avoid needing to by adding more RAM. Modern OS's are much better at managing swap than what early versions of Mac OS (before OS X) were as far as I understand - although the first apple I bought had OS X on it so this isn't first hand experience.
All I'm really saying is that whilst its fine for the OS to use swap, and there are times when it may well be more efficient to swap code out of RAM whilst you use the same RAM to buffer disk reads, in reality if your main, active programs are swapping, its really worthwhile thinking about getting more RAM. Particularly so if you are a business - RAM is cheap compared to employee time.
It wasn't like this 10 years ago; computers were totally constrained by CPU power, RAM and hard disk space. Now, there are few things left where these are issues. Mostly video and gaming. And of course you just can't get a pipe to the internet thats too big; or a battery that lasts long enough for any portable device.
Hope this explains what I was trying to say a bit better.
I beg to differ. While I agree that VMM was essentially non-existent in OS9, being able to lock down large chunks of memory and manage it yourself is great for software that deals with huge graphic images. Photoshop, for instance, tiles images into smaller chunks and has it's own internal VMM to deal with those tiles in an way that is very, very efficient.
And I would beg to point out that RAM is very, very cheap now. If you have enough of it, you shouldn't swap. I have 2GB of RAM on my laptop, and that was arguably 1GB too much... Unless you are doing video or games, RAM is unlikely to be a big concern now. In fact, I could virtualise out a couple of instances of Windows on the laptop and do the photoshop editing in them, and probably not go to swap there....
Sadly, that's US market share. Their worldwide market share barely moved. Which I can understand, cost isn't as important here, go to India or China, cost is everything. Even with the reputed higher maintenance effort needed for Windows systems, labor is definitely cheap enough to cover that.
I would agree with this (I haven't seen figures for Australia but I'm sure its similar to the US - you see those glowing apple logo's everwhere there are laptops now). In the emerging markets, cost is everything. Of course, Linux is cheap, and is a real threat to Microsoft there where people actually look at the true cost. (Thus the very stripped down cheap version of windows for the asian markets).
That software isn't a problem. That software can be removed. What might be considered a problem is a webcam in every computer. Some companies don't like that.
There is also application availability, many corporations need some obscure or custom app that's not available on OS X, and the cost of Parallels and the maintenance hassle of supporting something like that might not be worth it, that sort of arrangement would more than offset the ease of OS X maintenance.
I wouldn't argue with your analysis. There are lots of reasons why corporations may not be that interested in an apple computer, even if it is equal cost wise. Of course, when you consider the camera a negative, ignore the apps and have to add in a WinXP licence to each apple laptop, its not surprising that you see business passing over apple computers.
Likewise Apple hasn't put nearly the effort into enterprise that Microsoft has. Which is not to say that they have done nothing, but really apple is just starting to turn its attention there, and probably not that seriously yet.
What they have done so very well is aim for the home user. All those apps that many companies would delete (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, etc) are the very reason that people buy a Mac. I know people who bought an apple simply to use the video editing alone (home use, not professional).
There is an obvious connection with the iPod here - very few corporate buyers, pretty good sales.
That is not to say that apple couldn't or shouldn't compete in the corporate world. But if they had chosen to do this directly, they would have gone against the M$ juggernaut, and lost badly.
The flip side is that M$ is producing an operating system that is primarily designed to be sold to enterprise. The home user sales flowed on from this because people didn't see a better alternative. And M$ wasn't that interested in producing it. The burden of antivirus software, for example, is alot lower in the enterprise when you have a team of IT people who manage all the machines anyway. They are going to enforce corporate policy, restrict individual users, and so on. In this fashion you can make a windows machine relatively secure. Few home users can do this properly for themeslves. Few ever will.
Look at where Apple is pusing things. Take automated data backup - aka - "Time Machine" in the lepoard release of OS X (10.5). This is something that home users should do, and that M$ have never bothered to do properly. Does this matter in the enterprise? Does anyone see corporations supplying individual users with a USB HDD and telling them to do daily backups?
So to expand on my original statement. The future for Apple is the home user market. There was a time when only a company would fork out the money (>$4000) to buy one of those expensive compter things. Back then the company that made an OS for that purpose was always going to win the day. Lots fought for this title. Microsoft won.
Today, that market still exists, and is huge. Its also commodity hell for the manufacturers. Today a $1000+ system starts to look expensive to the enterprise, but lots of home users will spend that sort of money, or more, on a variety of consumer electronics. This is a whole new market, but nobody really noticed its potential until a couple o
It will be 18% in 3 months timen (Based on surveys of planned purchases within 3 months, which are alot less likely to change than the 1+ year buyer self assessments of 37%, many of which will actually not buy an apple computer).
They are rapidly moving to becoming a, if not the, serious choice for the home user. (Lots of those PC sales are to big corporations, for desktops - and Apple is going to struggle to sell corporations that they need iMovie, iTunes or iPhoto, no matter how good they are as apps).
Combine visible laptops with visible iPods, and alot of consumers are going to be viewing an apple computer as a normal purchase, rather than something obscure and unusual. In fact, if you haven't seen lots of apple laptops around the place, you probably aren't looking around much in the last year or so.
Anyway, my 2c worth, and its an easy bet because I'm not really saying anything other than extrapolating current market growth.
I'd suggest taking the parent with a grain of salt, but I am afraid it would not be sufficient. A few spoonfuls would probably be required to maintain the salt balance and prevent death.
Yes, I'd take my own posting with a few grains of salt....
I think it would work, in theory +/- a small rounding error or so...
But as they say, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
Patients on life support? Is this the new "it's for the chilllldren!" in the software industry? Hospitals and life-support systems seem to come up really often when validation scenarios like this are discussed, yet, I have never, EVER heard of a patient dying because Windows crashed. I suspect this might be due to medical equipment manufacturers not quite being dumber than a bag of hammers and therefore not using Windows in life-critical situations.
Actually, it probalby has happened. And you won't hear about it if it has, most likely.
Basically when an error occurs, mostly the patients forgive the staff if they are upfront about things. Occasionally people look at compensation. Usually this sort of thing ends up in a closed claim; you will never hear about it publicly. I have know of all sorts of equipment failures to occur, some of them with bad outcomes, but its rare for a failure to go public, for any reason.
For example, I've seen diagnostic imaging machines (based on windows) that have crashed mid operation; or which take so long to start up the information they provide is too late.... Do you really think if this went public that this would sound like a good defence? "We bought the machines because they had a good feature set, but they take too long to start up sometimes, nobody thought about this when we made the purchase?" Just one tiny example.
But, I'll promise you, there are people who do all sorts of silly things when they build equipment....
Occasionally you will get a Dr. Death that makes the news, but this is rare. Everything else gets swept as much as possible by management.
Look, the only way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume. It's calories in versus calories out and Enviga, metabolically will not let you magically burn more calories by consuming it unless it can somehow short circuit the electron transport chain or mitochondrial respiration and that is dangerous as hell.
There is a much more simple way to lose weight - the cold water method
Remember that a calorie is the energy used to heat one ml of water by one degree celcius. No the calories mentioned with weight loss are actually kilocalories, so 1 Kcal is the energy needed to heat 1 litre of water one degree celcius.
So far, so good. So to lose a Kg in weight, you need to burn about 7000 calories; so you could raise 1 litre of water to a very hot temperature, or 7000 litres of water just 1 degree.
Just as dieting is balanced, I would reccommend taking a balanced approach here. You could raise about 200 litres of water 35 degrees and that gets you over the "magic" 7000 figure here.
How? Easy. Just take one large bath tub. Fill with water. Add ice and straw. Drink.
Voila! An easy Kg of weight loss, no exercise required.
Your bodies natural regulatory mechanisms will maintain your temperature at 37 degrees, and the ice will keep the water at 0 degrees, easily maintaining a >35 degree differential.
And it doesn't get any more natural than water; no nasty chemicals involved.
SF (which originally meant "science fiction", not "speculative fiction") was born of the idea that a story would be wrapped around one or more concepts that either were supportable using current science, or could reasonably be extrapolated from current science. Hence, the "science." This was the thing that differentiated the genre from, for instance, just anything you wanted to write about. The idea was to inflame the reader with "Wow! This could actually happen!"
The problem with this definition is that science changes over time, and the list of what is possible changes.
So some stories would be SF; but cease to be when science deems this no longer possible.
Lots of SF involves wormholes, for example, and most of what is suggested would not be possible by our current understanding of black holes, but were originally possible in theory (when the theory was not well refined)
If you "grandfather" these stories, you also have the problem that two identical stories, published on different dates, would be categorised differently.
At the end of the day, fiction is fiction. I like SF (but not the fantasy stuff that much at all) but I think you always have to give a little bit of latitude. Some of it will actually turn out true (eg geostationary orbits from Arthur C Clarke), but most of it will just be an interesting story at best.
You should've still been able to see the cyan lettering and the cursor... unless, of course, you had previously entered "POKE 641,0"
(if my two-decade-old memory is accurate)
You are doing well. I think your memory is accurate, but I'm not sure that I want to admit this...
I would think that alot of people reading this site have no idea what that.sig referred to, but to be honest I'd rather not admit that I do remember some of this also.
To even admit that you worked on a computer where you know where things are located by an absolute memory address simultaneously gives you geek cred and acknowledges that you might be too old to really care whether or not others think you are a geek anyway.
Have you tried to archive/compress them first [gzip/zip/etc], then move the big file over? Lots of small files take longer to move than fewer larger files.
Is it just possible that you are confusing bits with bytes per second? 400 Mb/s is about 40 MB/s (or pretty close, especially as you rarely the full theoretical 50 MB/s that you would think this would equate to).
No. For starters, it can't directly access the graphics hardware, which makes it useless for almost any 3D gaming. It also uses an enormous amount of CPU time sitting around doing absolutely nothing. Seriously- XP, sitting doing nothing, nothing open- uses 20% of my Macbook's CPU. In Qemu (or rather, the Q Project build of QEMU), it's under 5%...and QEMU is emulating, whereas Parallels supposedly is using virtualization technology. What the hell?
My macbook only needs about 5% of CPU time using parallels. But that is running windows 2000. Maybe its not parallels fault that XP is doing stuff when its supposed to be idle?
These tests can be done safely, but they need to be done with proper care. You need someone that can check the device (either pacemaker or defibrillator) for battery life and overall functionality. Not every doctor should do this but they should at least know enough to send their patients to someone that can and will. If your cardiologist says flat out that it can't be done then maybe it is time to find one that is a little more current on their stuff.
Interesting. What sort of MRI are you doing with people with pacemakers? Cardiac MRI? I'm stunned if you can get anything decent image wise if you have a wire in the middle of your field....
By the way, the MRI I work in isn't really that much of a cardiac MRI, although we do some. I'd still be pretty darn worried before putting anyone with that much metal in them near the magnet. If you saw the efforts we go to to pull all the electricals out of the fields - fibre optic oximetry, carbon fibre ECG leads, etc. You would know why I'm stunned that you can put a pacemaker anywhere near the magnet.
YOU CAN HAVE A MRI AS LONG AS YOUR CARDIOLOGIST IS NOT A DUMB ASS. Quit spreading this lie. I work for a Cardiac electrophysiologist and we do these every week. Yes there are some risks and the patient needs to be monitored but it can be done and it is safe.
I find this statement rather strange. I am fairly familiar with MRI - I have worked in MRI scanners regularly for a few years now and everyone down there is fairly aware of just what it means to have a couple of Tesla's of magnetic field strength means (Most are between 0.5 to about 3 Tesla's in strength). It will take a pen and accelerate it up enough to pull it through the donut and either stick to the wall of the magnet or fling it across the room. And the only metal bit in the pen is maybe the nib and the little spring that makes the pen click up an down.
Specifically, we don't let people with all sorts of metal in them go into the scanner. Pacemakers, aneurysm clips in their brains, and so on.
The risks of this to the if you go into a MRI with these sorts of things include: 1. Heating effects. The field is pulsing in enough energy to push alot of electrons into high spin orbitals and then read the energy as they relax (or so I understand - I'm no physicist). This is bad enough when you are just in the scanner for a while ( you can come out a little hot and sweaty in the more powerful magnets), but any coiling of wires (eg the non ferrous conducting carbon leads that we use to read the ECG/EKG) leads to a real risk of alot of heating. This would occur inside a person just as easily as outside.
2. Electrical effects. If you have a pacing wire inside you and you put it in a strong and changing magnetic field you will generate electrical currents. If this is on a pacing lead then they have a direct outlet onto your heart. This would not be a good thing.
3. Interference - pacing boxes would interfere strongly with any imaging near to them, so if they were near to the heart (which they usually are!) then it would be quite hard to image the heart.
4. Movement - a small pacing box probably wouldn't be enough to cause someone to stick to the walls of the magnet. Or then again, it might. I don't know, I've never tried. But it would certainly pull. this might not be good for the bits that screw into the wall of your heart.
All in all, while it is possible that I am the ignorant one here, I am very sceptical that any MRI unit would let someone with a pacemaker anywhere near the magnet. I know for a fact that nobody in our institution with a pacemaker gets anywhere near the magnet - patient or staff.
Would you care to name the institution that lets people with real pacemakers go into MRI units? I think some people might be quite interested in this..
This will be a great help to those with actual pacemakers if they can use this. Currently if you have a pacemaker, diagnostic equipment like MRI are not available as the magnettic forces can move the wires and cause other weird things to happen.
There are alot of reasons that this won't help as many people as you might think.
Mostly this is because pacemakers are now being used to do things which natural heart muscle cannot do anyway.
These technologies include:
Defibrillating (ie electric shock) a heart if it arrests. Short bursts of fast pacing for hearts in certain fast rhythms. Coordinated depolarisation of different parts of enlarged hearts to make all the walls of the heart contract at once. When hearts get injured they often get bigger, and biological conduction systems conduct too slowly for a large heart so the cardiac effort is wasted more as the heart gets bigger, making a bad system worse.
So, if your heart is otherwise normal and you just have a conduction problem, great - this might help.
On the other hand, hearts that need pacing usually aren't normal in lots of other ways, and in these areas just putting a small bit of "normal" tissue in won't give as much benefit as a pacemaker.
Slashdot Mirror
I was watching my teenage brother-in-law play Zelda (I don't recall which) on his gamecube the other day. The graphical style of the game was very effective, and I think it would actually lose appeal going to higher resolution.
Now all you experts can respond and tell me why I'm totally wrong.
No, gameplay can be quite independent of resolution quality. In fact the earlier games were often good because they had to make the gameplay good. The graphics were never going to impress anyone.
All too often now a game gets released with really good graphics, but its still a crap game. Its easier to get a team to paint pixels than it is to get an innovative play line.
But that doesn't mean that graphics destroy a game. They just are used to hide a bad one....
Michael
To quote the web article:
Unusually, Oracle are claiming that they will support your operating system indefinitely as part of the Premier Support package which works out at $1199 and $1999.
These lifetime models get pretty interesting - you don't know if they are financially viable until a few years have gone by.
But I've seen a few health clubs, airlines and government pension plans so on, suffer on the weight of their liabilities such as lifetime memberships, lifetime frequent flyer points, a unfunded retirement pensions.
That is actually a big risk over a 10 year period..
Michael
I've been thinking/dithering about getting a MacBook but I cycle a lot. Will it fit into a standard sized pannier, or do you need some custom carrying accessory?
I use standard panniers, but put my laptop and its accessories into a laptop shoulder bag. Its actually a 12" one, which just happened to be long enough to hold the widescreen, as the 13.3 inch laptop is basically the same height as a 12" powerbook, but as wide as the 14" ibook.
I speak with no authority on this one, but I'd be putting it in some sort of padding just in case. The HDD will probably survive the trip without if its off or powered down, but why take a chance? Things can get bumpy and a padded case is worthwhile at the end of the trip anyway - I have all the other bits to go with it (display adaptors, etc) so I want something to pick up out of the pannier at the other end.
I'm just using the pannier to hold it on the side of the bike and keep it dry if it rains; so the double bag effect is a good idea anyway (and I usually don't power my laptop for the trip, I just shut the lid).
Hope this helps - anyway, this setup basically works for me.
Michael
Apple did borrow a winning strategy from Microsoft in keeping its technology proprietary. [Emphasis mine]
Suffice to say, even the slickest market campaign can't account alone for iPod's success; just look at the PS3 or Zune: you can't pull the wool over everyone's eyes all the time.
Perhaps more importantly, if apple has the patent, microsoft doesn't
It might be more of a blocking exercise than anything else - apple has a perfectly good model for sales, and might just be doing this to prevent other models from happening.
Probably being paranoid here
Michael
It's both good and bad that IE7 may be, in a sense, a wildcard. For one, it's good because those not running XP may switch to Firefox, as Kelson mentioned. The bad part is not that the masses who will use it will get a bad internet experience: IE7 should be fine for most people's internet needs (and wants). It's the fact that once the masses continue to take up IE7, Microsoft's potential whims on HTML code, and especially CSS, will have to become normal or else many will *gasp* become inconvenienced.
Actually, its the growth in apple, plus a bit of linux, plus win 2k/98, etc that will drive things the other way.
Firefox is the only single browser that runs everwhere. Easier to develop your website on that; once IE drops below 80% Firefox starts to get very attractive as an option.
Michael
Apple no longer offers any 7200 rpm drive in the 15" MacBook Pros, at any capacity. It's not standard, and it's not offered as an option. The only place it's still available is in the 17" model.
I stand corrected - I did check the store, but missed that it was missing as an option on the 15"
My apologies - I generally do check what I write pretty carefully before I hit the "submit" button....
I don't know why, but its a bit sad - especially on the Pro models - not because its critical in itself, but because its so much more of a pain to change the HDD on the Pro than it is on the MacBook. And there is no reason for Apple not to offer this - after all, its a PRO laptop.
Michael
Maybe it's just me, but this is the first I've heard of 2,5" HDs > 120 Gb...
I'm sure they've been around a while; I'm pretty sure 100GB was around when I upgraded my notebook from a 20GB drive to 60GB last year.
They have been around for a while.
I'm typing this on my factory fitted MacBook (not PRO) with 2GB RAM and 120 GB HDD.
Even 6 months ago this was an option on the macbook.
I just wish that they would let me spec out the MacBook better than this... For some reason Apple seems to think that the only people who want a powerful laptop want a large, powerful laptop.
I don't care if the case is white, black or metal terribly much, but I find the 13.3 inch MacBook a step down in portability from my 12 inch powerbook.
If you ride a bicycle to work, or fly on planes alot, you really want a small laptop.
Michael
Unfortunately, they eliminated the option for a 7200 rpm drive. It's a significant performance hit, if you're doing something that's I/O bound on the hard drive.
You can get a 7200 rpm drive, its not a standard but its an option. But you have to drop down to 100GB. I think this reflects the manufacturers.
Bear in mind that the 160 GB drives use perpendicular recording, so they increase the size by increasing the areal density of the data.
This also means that for a given speed of rotation, it will increase the data rates quite alot.
Seek times won't be helped by this increase in density however.
Michael
Also not mentioned is that 2gigs has been made the standard memory size with 1gig only available in the lowest model, with a 3gig option on the 17in version.
The 15 inch can go to 3gig too, just not a standard configuration
Michael
2 GB of RAM? How about a 500 Mb Photoshop file (NOT uncommon in the prepress industry), 1 undo, cut-and-paste. Swap. -G
Yes, that would be fair, that might go to swap on my laptop.
I'd definitely use a desktop for that - and now you are talking about commercial stuff.
A MacPro goes to 16GB. That would give you a few undo's.
Point is, you are right, you can force a modern machine to swap. Its not that hard to do if you want to try.
But you can generally avoid needing to by adding more RAM. Modern OS's are much better at managing swap than what early versions of Mac OS (before OS X) were as far as I understand - although the first apple I bought had OS X on it so this isn't first hand experience.
All I'm really saying is that whilst its fine for the OS to use swap, and there are times when it may well be more efficient to swap code out of RAM whilst you use the same RAM to buffer disk reads, in reality if your main, active programs are swapping, its really worthwhile thinking about getting more RAM. Particularly so if you are a business - RAM is cheap compared to employee time.
It wasn't like this 10 years ago; computers were totally constrained by CPU power, RAM and hard disk space. Now, there are few things left where these are issues. Mostly video and gaming. And of course you just can't get a pipe to the internet thats too big; or a battery that lasts long enough for any portable device.
Hope this explains what I was trying to say a bit better.
Michael
I beg to differ. While I agree that VMM was essentially non-existent in OS9, being able to lock down large chunks of memory and manage it yourself is great for software that deals with huge graphic images. Photoshop, for instance, tiles images into smaller chunks and has it's own internal VMM to deal with those tiles in an way that is very, very efficient.
And I would beg to point out that RAM is very, very cheap now. If you have enough of it, you shouldn't swap. I have 2GB of RAM on my laptop, and that was arguably 1GB too much... Unless you are doing video or games, RAM is unlikely to be a big concern now. In fact, I could virtualise out a couple of instances of Windows on the laptop and do the photoshop editing in them, and probably not go to swap there....
Michael
Sadly, that's US market share. Their worldwide market share barely moved. Which I can understand, cost isn't as important here, go to India or China, cost is everything. Even with the reputed higher maintenance effort needed for Windows systems, labor is definitely cheap enough to cover that.
I would agree with this (I haven't seen figures for Australia but I'm sure its similar to the US - you see those glowing apple logo's everwhere there are laptops now). In the emerging markets, cost is everything. Of course, Linux is cheap, and is a real threat to Microsoft there where people actually look at the true cost. (Thus the very stripped down cheap version of windows for the asian markets).
That software isn't a problem. That software can be removed. What might be considered a problem is a webcam in every computer. Some companies don't like that.
There is also application availability, many corporations need some obscure or custom app that's not available on OS X, and the cost of Parallels and the maintenance hassle of supporting something like that might not be worth it, that sort of arrangement would more than offset the ease of OS X maintenance.
I wouldn't argue with your analysis. There are lots of reasons why corporations may not be that interested in an apple computer, even if it is equal cost wise. Of course, when you consider the camera a negative, ignore the apps and have to add in a WinXP licence to each apple laptop, its not surprising that you see business passing over apple computers.
Likewise Apple hasn't put nearly the effort into enterprise that Microsoft has. Which is not to say that they have done nothing, but really apple is just starting to turn its attention there, and probably not that seriously yet.
What they have done so very well is aim for the home user. All those apps that many companies would delete (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, etc) are the very reason that people buy a Mac. I know people who bought an apple simply to use the video editing alone (home use, not professional).
There is an obvious connection with the iPod here - very few corporate buyers, pretty good sales.
That is not to say that apple couldn't or shouldn't compete in the corporate world. But if they had chosen to do this directly, they would have gone against the M$ juggernaut, and lost badly.
The flip side is that M$ is producing an operating system that is primarily designed to be sold to enterprise. The home user sales flowed on from this because people didn't see a better alternative. And M$ wasn't that interested in producing it. The burden of antivirus software, for example, is alot lower in the enterprise when you have a team of IT people who manage all the machines anyway. They are going to enforce corporate policy, restrict individual users, and so on. In this fashion you can make a windows machine relatively secure. Few home users can do this properly for themeslves. Few ever will.
Look at where Apple is pusing things. Take automated data backup - aka - "Time Machine" in the lepoard release of OS X (10.5). This is something that home users should do, and that M$ have never bothered to do properly. Does this matter in the enterprise? Does anyone see corporations supplying individual users with a USB HDD and telling them to do daily backups?
So to expand on my original statement. The future for Apple is the home user market. There was a time when only a company would fork out the money (>$4000) to buy one of those expensive compter things. Back then the company that made an OS for that purpose was always going to win the day. Lots fought for this title. Microsoft won.
Today, that market still exists, and is huge. Its also commodity hell for the manufacturers. Today a $1000+ system starts to look expensive to the enterprise, but lots of home users will spend that sort of money, or more, on a variety of consumer electronics. This is a whole new market, but nobody really noticed its potential until a couple o
Their share has moved from 2% to 6% already gartner You'll need a new line now.
More importantly, their share of laptop sales is 12%, and growing rapidly.
It will be 18% in 3 months timen (Based on surveys of planned purchases within 3 months, which are alot less likely to change than the 1+ year buyer self assessments of 37%, many of which will actually not buy an apple computer).
They are rapidly moving to becoming a, if not the, serious choice for the home user. (Lots of those PC sales are to big corporations, for desktops - and Apple is going to struggle to sell corporations that they need iMovie, iTunes or iPhoto, no matter how good they are as apps).
Combine visible laptops with visible iPods, and alot of consumers are going to be viewing an apple computer as a normal purchase, rather than something obscure and unusual. In fact, if you haven't seen lots of apple laptops around the place, you probably aren't looking around much in the last year or so.
Anyway, my 2c worth, and its an easy bet because I'm not really saying anything other than extrapolating current market growth.
Michael
I'd suggest taking the parent with a grain of salt, but I am afraid it would not be sufficient. A few spoonfuls would probably be required to maintain the salt balance and prevent death.
Yes, I'd take my own posting with a few grains of salt....
I think it would work, in theory +/- a small rounding error or so...
But as they say, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
The idea still makes me smile, however.
Michael
Patients on life support? Is this the new "it's for the chilllldren!" in the software industry? Hospitals and life-support systems seem to come up really often when validation scenarios like this are discussed, yet, I have never, EVER heard of a patient dying because Windows crashed. I suspect this might be due to medical equipment manufacturers not quite being dumber than a bag of hammers and therefore not using Windows in life-critical situations.
Actually, it probalby has happened. And you won't hear about it if it has, most likely.
Basically when an error occurs, mostly the patients forgive the staff if they are upfront about things. Occasionally people look at compensation. Usually this sort of thing ends up in a closed claim; you will never hear about it publicly. I have know of all sorts of equipment failures to occur, some of them with bad outcomes, but its rare for a failure to go public, for any reason.
For example, I've seen diagnostic imaging machines (based on windows) that have crashed mid operation; or which take so long to start up the information they provide is too late.... Do you really think if this went public that this would sound like a good defence? "We bought the machines because they had a good feature set, but they take too long to start up sometimes, nobody thought about this when we made the purchase?" Just one tiny example.
But, I'll promise you, there are people who do all sorts of silly things when they build equipment....
Occasionally you will get a Dr. Death that makes the news, but this is rare. Everything else gets swept as much as possible by management.
Michael.
Look, the only way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume. It's calories in versus calories out and Enviga, metabolically will not let you magically burn more calories by consuming it unless it can somehow short circuit the electron transport chain or mitochondrial respiration and that is dangerous as hell.
.....
There is a much more simple way to lose weight - the cold water method
Remember that a calorie is the energy used to heat one ml of water by one degree celcius. No the calories mentioned with weight loss are actually kilocalories, so 1 Kcal is the energy needed to heat 1 litre of water one degree celcius.
So far, so good. So to lose a Kg in weight, you need to burn about 7000 calories; so you could raise 1 litre of water to a very hot temperature, or 7000 litres of water just 1 degree.
Just as dieting is balanced, I would reccommend taking a balanced approach here. You could raise about 200 litres of water 35 degrees and that gets you over the "magic" 7000 figure here.
How? Easy. Just take one large bath tub. Fill with water. Add ice and straw. Drink.
Voila! An easy Kg of weight loss, no exercise required.
Your bodies natural regulatory mechanisms will maintain your temperature at 37 degrees, and the ice will keep the water at 0 degrees, easily maintaining a >35 degree differential.
And it doesn't get any more natural than water; no nasty chemicals involved.
Remember who told it to you first
Michael
SF (which originally meant "science fiction", not "speculative fiction") was born of the idea that a story would be wrapped around one or more concepts that either were supportable using current science, or could reasonably be extrapolated from current science. Hence, the "science." This was the thing that differentiated the genre from, for instance, just anything you wanted to write about. The idea was to inflame the reader with "Wow! This could actually happen!"
The problem with this definition is that science changes over time, and the list of what is possible changes.
So some stories would be SF; but cease to be when science deems this no longer possible.
Lots of SF involves wormholes, for example, and most of what is suggested would not be possible by our current understanding of black holes, but were originally possible in theory (when the theory was not well refined)
If you "grandfather" these stories, you also have the problem that two identical stories, published on different dates, would be categorised differently.
At the end of the day, fiction is fiction. I like SF (but not the fantasy stuff that much at all) but I think you always have to give a little bit of latitude. Some of it will actually turn out true (eg geostationary orbits from Arthur C Clarke), but most of it will just be an interesting story at best.
Michael
Wouldn't this be an accounting issue, for the Chief Financial Officer, not the Chief Executive Officer (Jobs)?
Michael
You should've still been able to see the cyan lettering and the cursor... unless, of course, you had previously entered "POKE 641,0"
.sig referred to, but to be honest I'd rather not admit that I do remember some of this also.
(if my two-decade-old memory is accurate)
You are doing well. I think your memory is accurate, but I'm not sure that I want to admit this...
I would think that alot of people reading this site have no idea what that
To even admit that you worked on a computer where you know where things are located by an absolute memory address simultaneously gives you geek cred and acknowledges that you might be too old to really care whether or not others think you are a geek anyway.
And yes, I loved my C= 64 too....
Michael
Have you tried to archive/compress them first [gzip/zip/etc], then move the big file over? Lots of small files take longer to move than fewer larger files.
Is it just possible that you are confusing bits with bytes per second? 400 Mb/s is about 40 MB/s (or pretty close, especially as you rarely the full theoretical 50 MB/s that you would think this would equate to).
Michael
No. For starters, it can't directly access the graphics hardware, which makes it useless for almost any 3D gaming. It also uses an enormous amount of CPU time sitting around doing absolutely nothing. Seriously- XP, sitting doing nothing, nothing open- uses 20% of my Macbook's CPU. In Qemu (or rather, the Q Project build of QEMU), it's under 5%...and QEMU is emulating, whereas Parallels supposedly is using virtualization technology. What the hell?
My macbook only needs about 5% of CPU time using parallels. But that is running windows 2000. Maybe its not parallels fault that XP is doing stuff when its supposed to be idle?
Michael
Thanks for this - I just learned a little tonight possibly.
Michael
These tests can be done safely, but they need to be done with proper care. You need someone that can check the device (either pacemaker or defibrillator) for battery life and overall functionality. Not every doctor should do this but they should at least know enough to send their patients to someone that can and will. If your cardiologist says flat out that it can't be done then maybe it is time to find one that is a little more current on their stuff.
Interesting. What sort of MRI are you doing with people with pacemakers? Cardiac MRI? I'm stunned if you can get anything decent image wise if you have a wire in the middle of your field....
By the way, the MRI I work in isn't really that much of a cardiac MRI, although we do some. I'd still be pretty darn worried before putting anyone with that much metal in them near the magnet. If you saw the efforts we go to to pull all the electricals out of the fields - fibre optic oximetry, carbon fibre ECG leads, etc. You would know why I'm stunned that you can put a pacemaker anywhere near the magnet.
Michael
YOU CAN HAVE A MRI AS LONG AS YOUR CARDIOLOGIST IS NOT A DUMB ASS. Quit spreading this lie. I work for a Cardiac electrophysiologist and we do these every week. Yes there are some risks and the patient needs to be monitored but it can be done and it is safe.
I find this statement rather strange. I am fairly familiar with MRI - I have worked in MRI scanners regularly for a few years now and everyone down there is fairly aware of just what it means to have a couple of Tesla's of magnetic field strength means (Most are between 0.5 to about 3 Tesla's in strength). It will take a pen and accelerate it up enough to pull it through the donut and either stick to the wall of the magnet or fling it across the room. And the only metal bit in the pen is maybe the nib and the little spring that makes the pen click up an down.
Specifically, we don't let people with all sorts of metal in them go into the scanner. Pacemakers, aneurysm clips in their brains, and so on.
The risks of this to the if you go into a MRI with these sorts of things include:
1. Heating effects. The field is pulsing in enough energy to push alot of electrons into high spin orbitals and then read the energy as they relax (or so I understand - I'm no physicist). This is bad enough when you are just in the scanner for a while ( you can come out a little hot and sweaty in the more powerful magnets), but any coiling of wires (eg the non ferrous conducting carbon leads that we use to read the ECG/EKG) leads to a real risk of alot of heating. This would occur inside a person just as easily as outside.
2. Electrical effects. If you have a pacing wire inside you and you put it in a strong and changing magnetic field you will generate electrical currents. If this is on a pacing lead then they have a direct outlet onto your heart. This would not be a good thing.
3. Interference - pacing boxes would interfere strongly with any imaging near to them, so if they were near to the heart (which they usually are!) then it would be quite hard to image the heart.
4. Movement - a small pacing box probably wouldn't be enough to cause someone to stick to the walls of the magnet. Or then again, it might. I don't know, I've never tried. But it would certainly pull. this might not be good for the bits that screw into the wall of your heart.
All in all, while it is possible that I am the ignorant one here, I am very sceptical that any MRI unit would let someone with a pacemaker anywhere near the magnet. I know for a fact that nobody in our institution with a pacemaker gets anywhere near the magnet - patient or staff.
Would you care to name the institution that lets people with real pacemakers go into MRI units? I think some people might be quite interested in this..
Michael
This will be a great help to those with actual pacemakers if they can use this. Currently if you have a pacemaker, diagnostic equipment like MRI are not available as the magnettic forces can move the wires and cause other weird things to happen.
There are alot of reasons that this won't help as many people as you might think.
Mostly this is because pacemakers are now being used to do things which natural heart muscle cannot do anyway.
These technologies include:
Defibrillating (ie electric shock) a heart if it arrests.
Short bursts of fast pacing for hearts in certain fast rhythms.
Coordinated depolarisation of different parts of enlarged hearts to make all the walls of the heart contract at once. When hearts get injured they often get bigger, and biological conduction systems conduct too slowly for a large heart so the cardiac effort is wasted more as the heart gets bigger, making a bad system worse.
So, if your heart is otherwise normal and you just have a conduction problem, great - this might help.
On the other hand, hearts that need pacing usually aren't normal in lots of other ways, and in these areas just putting a small bit of "normal" tissue in won't give as much benefit as a pacemaker.
Michael