Call me shortsighted, but I don't see the market for the 12" Powerbook. I think they'll merely be cannibalizing the sales of the existing iBook models. Consumers will be confused, product lines blurred.
The 12" PowerBook won't sell at all. Why pay $500 more for +67MHz and a G4? Screw that. Just buy an iBook. The only people that will buy that thing are people that want the cheapest possible way to get the SuperDrive notebook.
Well, time will tell, but I think the new 12" PowerBook will do fabulously well. In addition
to the faster G4, you get 802.11g vs 802.11b,
bluetooth, S-video and VGA out, a bigger hard disk that's ATA/100, more memory, faster graphics, a lighter notebook, and QuickBooks bundled. Oddly, you don't get Firewire800. In my world, the total
speed bump (which I'm guessing is substantial) is worth $300, 802.11g is worth $50, the bigger faster disk is $50 (it's a PAIN to swap
an iBook disk), the memory is worth $30, and the
S-video/VGA out (with true dual display) is worth
$100. I personally don't care about QuickBooks. So, I think this will definitely be worth it to some people even before you get to better looks
and snob appeal, although the 12 inch iBook is a beautiful product in its own right (I own one:-)). The odd computers out in this case are, I think, the 14.1" iBooks.
I hear it has popup blocking, which is nice. Does it have any tabs?
No tabs, no type-ahead. Some cookie control, but
not as nice as Mozilla's. These are all fixable things, of course, but I'm worried that somebody will think that tabbed browsing is "not the Apple way".:-(
No tabbed browsing (killer omission) and no type-ahead features, which sucks. It is very fast, however.
One nice feature, though, is emacs-style navigation
in type-in forms! Alas, that feature is a bit buggy, but I was very happy to see it.
Worst thing so far is that I couldn't post this
from Safari itself since it got confused when
I pressed the "Preview" button. OK, so Mozilla
was also slow, but I knew something was up due to
the, er, "throbber" thingie. No such beast on Safari.
There is some value in a closer analysis of the data, and perhaps a serious point about how things can be distorted beyond recognition. Despite the rhetoric about disproving the exponential, the data is full of them. It's just that it isn't one continuous curve, but segments.
Actually, those piece-wise fits aren't that great either, but even if they were, this is still a huge deal and a big difference. There is a *big*
difference between an assertion that "X doubles
every Y months" and the statment that "there is
rapid progress in fits and starts".
Does that remind you of anything? It looks suspiciously like organic growth to me; punctuated equilibrium, if you will.
Err...assuming you mean "evolution" rather than
"organic growth" (since you used the term "punctuated equilibria"), I have to say that this
doesn't really help your case much. The fact
that there *can* be rapid innovation doesn't mean
that species X has changed much at all in millions of years.
I kind of skipped around much of the "extended" Moore's law stuff, because it looked technicaly pretty weak as well.
Well, the problem is that "extended" Moore's Laws are way more commmonly invoked than, um, "strict"
Moore's Laws, and the problems that come up there
in terms of testing them are striking because it
then becomes very unclear why anybody should believe them in the first place...
While trying to make a point that it's hard to quantify increases in processing power, the paper doesn't bother to point out that over time the unit of processing power has gotten bigger, so it tends to deflate the actual MIPS or MFLOPS type numbers a bit (just as interconnect requirements make a lie of just counting transistors).
Actually, there are a couple of paragraphs devoted to topics like this...but it was easy to skim over them.:-)
It doesn't even touch on the advances in disks and such.
That's true, and I think that's interesting. First off, Moore's Law is less commonly invoked for disk drives (weirdly enough), but if I had to guess, I would expect that improvements in drive
capacity on the sweet spot of the price curve might be a better exponential fit than most of the
curves in the paper. Note: I have not checked this assertion, but it would be much easier to deal with than the pain involved in trying to define "computing power" or something.
I'm not sure what technical literature you've been reading, but every bit of prediction that I've read would do nothing more than perpetually claim the end of Moore's law, not the continuation of it.
Absolutely; and we know what happens next. Somebody comes up with a new and improved process
or a better substrate and, boom, another round of
improvement. Then the same thing happens N months
down the road. Now, I think the fact that many
people are missing here is that the *perception*
of what is going on here can be different from the
reality. The perception is that the people claiming limits we're about to hit will stop Moore's Law dead are seen as Chicken Littles who
are then steam-rolled by the onslaught of new
technology. In other words, the naive view is
that Moore's Law is repeatedly tested, and passes
the test each time. The truth is, people have such vague and inconsistent notions of what Moore's Law really is that there is no real test.
An even more striking truth, made in the article
quite clearly, is that there is no long-term exponential growth seen in any more concrete formulation of Moore's Law. I think some people
would be surprised that Moore's Law isn't right
even for the specific original case of the number
of components on a minimum cost per component silicon chip.
I recall in the 386 to 486 transition days when already they were ringing the death knells for the then nasceant "Moore's Law", assuring us all that transistors were hitting some magical limit and computing power had peaked.
I remember those days, too. To my eternal chagrin, I even believed some !@#$!@#$ pundit
and bought a 486/33 system on the premise that
faster systems would be unstable and that chip
prices would go up and stay up. Oops... Now
one point here is that Moore's Law (called that)
seems to be an idea that took off in the 80s,
and instantaneously morphed into a bunch of non-equivalent and inconsistent statements. Even
the transistor version is not the original one!
And the computing power version (which the article
covers in detail, by the way) is a real stretch.
This same cycle has continued for years. This idea that "Moore's Law" has sold us all on some endless progress is absolutely, positively ridiculous: We've had progress in spite of the constant cries of the death or Moore's Law.
See my reply above; I really do think many or most non-engineers do have the kind of magical thinking
you suggest is ridiculous. In particular, it is
the fact the constant cries of the death of Moore's Law *seem* to be just cries of "wolf" that
make the "truth" of Moore's Law appear stronger
to many people, particularly including the pundit
class (e.g., check out the writings of Cringely)
and also to many economists (see the paper for
more cites). Now the real news here is that when
you do look carefully at any concrete data set, you do *not* see an exponential growth curve. In
other words, Moore's Law has not really been tested since it was never really true at all.
Now, this is not to say that we will not continue
to have progress, or that progress will not be
at some times fairly rapid (but note that progress
to date has been far less smooth than many people
assume). I think it is important to note that it
does *not* make sense to make assumptions about
the future rate of progress.
How you curve balled the somewhat humorous and loose observation by Gordon Moore into Worldcom baffles me.
I'll explain the segue more carefully below. But
please read the article in question; I do not
really believe your contention that Gordon Moore
was trying to be either "somewhat humorous" or
"loose". In the presentations he made on the
subject, there were real graphs with real data;
in the years after, he has made a point of correcting people's statements about the law (e.g., he never said anything doubles in "18 months" but rather first "1 year" and then later
"2 years". I think he is whimsical about it being
called a law and named after him.
Worldcom had nothing to do with rational thought, but rather outright fraud and irrational pyramid scheme exhuberance. I highly doubt that anyone was thinking "oooh, if Moore's Law has held true, then therefore this stock will go up forever!".
OK, there are two points going on here. One is
that Worldcom, the company, was a corrupt and fraud-ridden organization whose stock price went way up in a bubble economy. And you're right, that part has nothing to do with my argument.:-)
That said, there were huge numbers of companies,
old and new, that suddenly saw what they believed
to be a nearly limitless opportunity to build out
national (and global) optical fiber networks, and
(separately) others saw a huge market to work on "last mile" solutions. Now, the only way the
huge fiber roll-outs would make sense is if internet traffic was increasing really, really fast. In particular, these business plans were toast unless there was a period of fast exponential growth. Worldcomm certainly did
make this claim. You could see this in a number of places, but let's go for this one in Worldcomm's 1999 annual report:
Internet bandwidth demand doubles about every three to four months!
Interestingly, that was a true statement at one time...but I believe only for a six-month period
in about 1994 or 1995. The doubling rate has
slowed way down now (which means, of course, that
we are not talking about an exponential growth
process, and probably never were). But, as they
say, the rest is history. Now I claim the connection between Moore's Law and internet traffice (or networks) was made early and often, and you can google up the number of hits for "moore's law" and any of "optical fiber", "internet" or "last mile" and get thousands of hits. Try it and see. (Don't follow any of the links if you have a weak stomache...)
Now, wasn't this all particularly witless? Sure
it was, since nobody much bothered to pay attention to the actual traffic data and say "wait a minute...". But, irrational though it may sound, people thought they had a previous piece of
empirical truth about the *possibility* of exponential growth in technology, namely Moore's Law, which seemed to hold true (NOT!) for 40 years. Heck, you could even be "sophisticated" about it and claim that the fastest doublings would only hold for a period of 5 years...but of
course it didn't come close to that. That's
the problem with assuming an exponential.
Anyway, I hope I've cleared some stuff up. People have big troubles reasoning with exponential growth scenarios. They underestimate how badly
they are being hurt by credit card debt, but do
not appreciate how rare true (even temporary!) exponential growth is in many other situations.
Moore's so-called law is just a way of saying "Geez, this shit is changing really fast!" I'd say it applies less than it used to, but talk about it fitting (or not) "concrete observational data" is just plain absurd.
I don't think history is on your side here. Moore's Law gets noticed and quoted precisely because it seems to be so precise; it was a statement made by an engineer about the number of components that could be fit onto a chip, and then later interpreted to be a statement that progress in that particular corner of technology was exponentially fast over an appreciable chunk of history. Exponential growth is basically something that never happens for very long, but here was a factual observation that we were doing a really good job of keeping up, and doing it for decades.
But we really weren't.
Seriously, it *is* a really big deal when an idea as big and as potentially important as Moore's Law turns out to have little or no substance.
Is this a joke? Moore's law isn't E or the speed of sound: It's a general hypothesis about the rate of technological progress. No one expects there to be an absolute correlation, and really any correlation that there has been has largely been perceived as humorous in the context of the "law" (it isn't a "law", of course, but is rather an "observation").
I frankly don't care to get into the discussion
of whether you should have called it a "Law", "Hypothesis", "Theory", "Observation", "Note", or anything else. In any case, what you would expect is that there was some concrete statement being
made about technological progress (i.e., "X doubles in Y months") and that if you checked it
out, you would find basic agreement of fact with
the statement.
As it turns out, you find that the history behind
Moore's Law is really murky, and the fits to data aren't really even close for any concrete statement. Now, this would be okay if, as you say, people really did suggest this was all just
a joke. But I'm not sure that it was, and, if it was just a joke, I can assure you that way too many people took it pretty seriously
without checking it out. You see, the
problem goes beyond whether or not the doubling
time is 11 months or 42 months or what have you.
The point more seriously is that the existence
of something like Moore's law, which was the observation of an exponential growth process over
the course of decades, gives people license to believe (and they have) that technology really will always be there to step up, or (alternatively) that (chip) technology provides
a model for what other fields could hope to accomplish if only they could {fill in the nostrum here}. I find the fact that there is not now nor
was there ever any big reason to believe that
anything like Moore's Law fit tech data of any kind to be...striking.
Or, let me put it another way. Worldcom almost
brought the entire telecomm industry to its knees by playing a similar stunt, suggesting that lots
of serious investment in infrastructure was needed because the growth rate of the internet was such that the number of {bits, packets, whatever} transmitted was doubling every {small time period}. Billions in capital were essentially lost because nobody poked around hard enough to find that the data Worldcom used to support their
case covered about six months of UUNet growth in the mid-90s. Why were people so completely fooled? I'd suggest part of the reason was that
we had been accustomed to the notion that technological progress could be exponential, since, hey, hadn't this guy Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors you could put into
a given area of silicon would double every 18 months?
For my last point, you should also take note that Apple's hardware sales support not only production, but the OS and all the iApps you could ever hope for.
As the saying goes, "the first one is free...".
Seriously, people who shelled out $129 for the
10.2 upgrade know all too well that the full
lifetime cost of owning a Mac is definitely greater than the upfront box cost. For that matter, the one apparently absolutely true rumor
about MacWorld is that improved versions of the
iApps will come out...but that there will be an
upgrade cost there, too. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with attempting to charge
for the upgrades, only that I wouldn't use them
as my only argument for why the hardware sells
at a premium. Macs cost more because people are
willing to pay more, and that's basically the
whole story.
Think about where the $1,799 goes for the 15" flat panel iMac with SuperDrive:
15" LCD screen
800 Mhz G4
60 gig HD
GeForce 2
Ethernet, modem
DVD-R (RW, though not well advertised)
(I'm deleting the software list here for space.)
OK, so I think we're talking $300 for the screen,
$300 for the everything else on the logic board inlcuding the modem and ethernet,
$50 wholesale for the drive, $50 for the video card, $50 for the mouse and keyboard and everything else including the box. $50 for shipping and handling. That's $800. $250 for
the DVD-RW drive, and we get $1050. Call it $1200
once you throw in the software. Apple's gross
margins are about 25% on these I think, so now the
cost is $1500. Store margin would be about 20%
for these, and you get that $1800 sticker price.
If this were Dell, you'd be paying $1200 plus
10% mark-up or maybe $1350 without shipping. Now,
I've replaced Mac OS X 10.2 with XP Home and the
trinkets that Dell provides, and you could argue
that the Apple is worth more. I wouldn't argue
with that myself, but I don't believe for a minute it is because Apple is giving you a deal on the hardware. You pay the extra $400 or so because you *know* (correctly, I believe) that it is worth it to get a computer where everything truly "just works". I value my time fairly cheaply, but not cheaply enough so I want to spend 20 hours trying
to get stuff to work that should work out of the
box.
[About the market for an iPod with a 6" screen for
maps and photos and stuff.]
Again, "do people want this?" The answer is still no.
I think that the market for PDAs is instructive here. People really like the idea of having all of their contacts and appointments on one. Some
people really like the idea of reading email and/
or light web browsing on one. I don't really know anybody who *likes* using one to take notes, though. People also really like portable MP3
players, and like the iPod as a portable hard disc. An MP3 player with a screen usable for
hand-writing recognition, the usual and unusual PDA functions, some simple games, and enough hard disc space to matter (e.g., all of your photos,
all of your user files), is a big win over even
a 5 pound notebook. Is the market big enough?
I'm not sure, but it isn't that tiny.
Moore's law has never been anything but an observation. I guess after calling it a law for thirty years, people start confusing it with a foundation of the computing industry.
Please read the article. Pretty please. It is waaay more serious than that. If the author of
the article is correct, Moore's Law, in either its orginal, revised, or vastly mutated forms does not
really fit ANY concrete observational data we have. This is important because exponential and sub-exponential growth rates are very different
things.
Finally, someone who actually read the damned article. I agree - further, the only point the guy ever made seemed to be that Moore and crew fudged the doubling time from 1 year, to 2 years, maybe even three. Whatever.
No. Wrong. Sorry, try reading the *whole* article again. The BIG major point of the article, which he point out at the very beginning, by the way, is just this:
Moore's Law has never really existed in any form that is consistent or interesting to us.
It isn't "just" that the doubling times was fudged (although when you're talking about a presumably exponential process a little fudge goes a *long* way). The above bold point really breaks up into
three major claims:
Moore's Law lacks a consistent formulation.
Possible choices of formulations that appear to
be most consistent with the 1965 original or
1975 revised presentations of the law do not
fit the data.
Extensions, of either the tech-savvy, popular, or raw economic (price/performance) variety, do not work empirically, either.
Seriously, it *is* a really big deal when an idea
as big and as potentially important as Moore's Law turns out to have little or no substance. It is
always a rude awakening when you find out that a
growth process that appears to be exponential has
hit some limit. It may be worse in some ways to
find out that not only were you not looking at
some coherent or unitary process, but that none
of the obvious possibilities really ever seemed
to show an exponential growth curve for more than
5 years or so.
Looks to me like some jackass with no credibility is trying to make a name for himself by "publishing" a junk article in a "peer-reviewed" online journal by "proving" that Moore's law isn't a fundamental phenomenon. Well, duh.
I don't think you read this very carefully. I
don't think the author cares at all about
fundamental phenomena, just whether there is
any testable content to various formulations of Moore's Law, and if there is something you can
test, do the empirical data fit the law. Very,
very embarassingly, (in my opinion) nobody much
bothered to do this before, and the actual data
lend very little support to any statement more
concrete than "technology has improved significantly and rapidly since the invention of the IC".
Re:This is not predicting the death of Moores's La
on
Moore's Law Disputed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Did anyone actually read the damn article?
It looks like about 3 people so far, but some read
it more carefully than others. Please everybody who is reading this: read this article article because it is very important.
Again, though, even people who have read the article (or skimmed it) appear not to have gotten
the full message. So Junks Jerzey writes:
And specifically Moore never gave the time frame of "18 months." He said "1 year" one time, then later said "2 years." And if you look at the data, the transistor count of chips doubles roughly every 26 months, not 18.
It's much worse than that, actually. When he
really pulls the gloves off and looks at the hard
data over the entire 43-year history of the
industry, he finds *no* simple doubling time for
almost any measure of interest that has been
claimed to be Moore's Law or any folk version of
it. Even for transistor counts. What you can
sometimes sort of show is iffy exponential fits
to the data for 5-10 year periods. Strikingly, though, the doubling rates for several of the measures the author investigates have *slowed*. Improvements do keep on happening, but the pace
of the improvement is not as consistent or rapid
as you might have expected.
Now the big deal about this is simple. Anybody
who tries to project that our problems will be
solved when X doubles in Y months is really walking on thin ice. It is also important because
chip technology has often been held up as some
special and amazing business whose success should
be inspirational to us all, since it improves so
fast. Clearly, improvements in raw components
have been rapid (although not as rapid as you might expect), but the Big Changes caused by technology are rarely tightly coupled to the speed
of improvement in underlying technology. Hey,
the *big* change of the last decade is that your grandma now probably has email. I'm not sure it
makes sense to calculate how many transistors that
took.
The number of stories posted on Slashdot about the end of Moore's Law will double every 18 months.
OK, so this is the second prediction of Moore's Law
acting on the number of stories about the end of Moore's law that will be posted on Slashdot.
I can now confidently assert that the number of comments suggesting that Moore's Law will act on the number of stories about the end of Moore's Law that will be posted on Slashdot will itself be subject to Moore's Law.
Worse than that, the number of snide comments pointing out that Moore's Law governs the number of comments suggesting that Moore's Law applies to the number of stories on Slashdot asserting that the end of Moore's Law will also follow Moore's Law. Thankfully, there's only one of *these* this time, but God help us 10 years from now.:-)
It's just like the old SGML module for Word they used to have about 6 years ago. My guess is that there will be some significant drawback to saving documents in XML, such as loss of some formatting information.
Um... You'd better hope that saving to XML loses some formatting information,
since that's the whole point of *ML approaches: to separate content from presentation. A more charitable reading of what you say is that the style sheet you need to apply to the XML to render a Word document might be crippled. Could be.
Frankly, though, I suspect that the *opposite* thing will occur. The style sheets won't be crippled, rather, they will be absolutely wonderful. So good, in fact, that you would not want to do without them. So powerful, that you will want to re-do your entire website in Word XML just to use them, and allow users complete transparency in going to-and-fro. Regular HTML and will become scarce on the web. PDF will also
be seen as less necessary.
Of course, there might be a catch or two...like,
the style sheets will never be publicly available,
and you will not be allowed to use them from a non-MS browser, and the XSLT that allows you to
export to html and pdf won't work quite right...
As always, you have to be very careful about what you ask for, since you might just get it.
Before you guys all start dissing math chicks, remember that "mathematicans do it smoothly and continuously".
OK, but mathematicians can usually only prove things about what we might "bodily functions" when they consider what goes on in tiny local neighborhoods that are only frequented by other mathematicians.:-)
What I meant by that snide crack is that economics pretends to be a science in the same way that psychology has in the past, when it's pretty obvious that neither are.
Speak for yourself, Mr. Snide. Both are sciences, albeit really difficult ones to do good work in. But the best work in Psychology at least is stuff that can be envied by any experimental scientist.
The problem is, combined federal, state and local government here now represents about 50% of the market place, as opposed to around 5% prior to 1910.
Sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean here. As a share of GDP, the 1999 figures I'm familiar with say it's 29%. Furthermore, you are going to have to do a lot to convince me that this amount of increase is a bad thing. Life expectancies are way up, poverty is way down, education has improved for the vast majority, and we are no longer the same country we once were in almost any sense. I think it is healthy to debate our government funding priorities, and I know there is money being spent I would rather were not spent. But if you make me pick between 2002 and 1902, the choice is too easy. And if you argue that we've made all of this progress completely in spite of the government, I'm afraid to say I would like to see a lot of specific evidence that this is true.
Economic 'proofs' aren't worth the paper they're written on, which is why the Nobel Prize for Economics is a joke. They may as well have one for psychology as well.:)
I understand that you were responding to a comment
that was surreal at best, but I could not really let this pass.
The problem with proofs (economic or otherwise)
is that they can only be used "in real life" when
the axiomatic system and additional assumptions that underlie them are sufficiently close to reality. Hayek got a Nobel in Economics not for
what a lot of Hayek fans think he did, but for a
fairly general argument about the availability of relevant information to economic planners and their ability to set prices. It really is and was a useful result.
Interestingly, this year's winners of the Nobel
in Economics were pioneers in the use of actual
experimental data to address issues that were crucial to economics, and one of them was a card-carrying psychologist. I doubt
this will create any huge shift in how economists
do most of what they do, but I think that it is important to note that there is and will be a more
empirical kind of economics being done that might make the science a bit less "Ivory Tower" than it has been.
Now, something that really worries me about the current line-up of Nobel Prizes is the extent to which the amount of actual science being done has "drifted" away from the set prize categories. I think this is particularly true for the "Medicine or Physiology" Prize, which is basically the only one anybody in medicine or any biological science
can ever hope to win. To be completely frank about it, there are waaay more deserving potential
recipients in those fields these days than can ever possibly win given the current rules. The pure science of Biology has absolutely exploded in importance in the last half century, and Medicine has made breath-taking progress as well, but the prizes were set up a century ago, so everybody has to queue up in these two vast fields. I can't help thinking that if Nobel were establishing the Prizes today, that this and similar problems would be fixed somehow. In the mean time, it's clear to me that while there are certainly some psychologists who would be deserving of a Nobel Prize (and Kahneman was among them), the field as a whole really has not yet reached the point where
amazing progress is a yearly event, to the point where ignoring the field prize-wise is anything like the embarassing situation in the life sciences.
AFAIK, chimpanzee DNA has never been fully sequenced(?). Comparisons have probably been made using simpler DNA typing procedures.
Chimp DNA is being worked on right now; not sure of the ETA, but you can be certain that this will make a big splash when even a draft sequence is released.
Most comparison made between chimp and human DNA so far have either been simple hybridization experiments, or comparisons of tens (now hundreds) of genes sequenced in both species. The short story is: wow, these genomes are close, but on the other hand we are *rather* different from chimps in many ways that matter quite a lot.
The new "idiot cameras" are called APS cameras (or Advantix if you're Kodak).
Before them were the "disc cameras" of the... when was it, 80's?
"Disc cameras" were the 80s. Very 80s. I worked in a massive photo developing operation as a summer job in the early 80s, and a reasonable portion of our workload was the disc stuff. All
I can say there is: eeeuw! The size of the negative on those was miniscule, and the prints *all* looked pretty sucky in comparison to almost
anything else (a really bad 110 was worse). The
only advantage/claim to fame of the disc film media was that the film was, of course, perfectly
flat, so that in theory you could achieve arbitrarily good focus...but then you gave all of that up and more for the teeny tiny negative image. Plus, you had identically 15 snaps per disc.
That said, I personally *liked* to work with the
disc stuff (I was a print cutter/packager type)
precisely because nobody else liked it, so the
"standard" for cutting those prints was set so low that I could work at 200% of standard for those
runs and either look really good or relax a bit
on some of the other stuff.
Why should MacOSX Users learn UNIX? The other review of this book I read said that that point wasn't covered.
Do you mean the "explaining why you might want to learn about Unix" part, or do you mean that the book doesn't do a good job of teaching parts of Unix that are of interest to most users of OS X?
If it's the latter, I would agree that most Mac OS X users probably don't care; they're going to buy
the "Missing Manual" series or something. If it's the former, that might be more of a problem.
My guess is that the average reader of this book is somebody who was really into Mac OS X, and then saw somebody perform a Unix command line magic trick that saved tham a whole day's work. This does happen, and it does have an effect on the witnesses, who then go forth,
intrigued, to the bookstore. But, lo: the
Unix books are written for the high priests! Ah, here's a book for an acolyte like me...it even says "Mac OS X" in the title.:-)
Time will tell if there really is an audience for this or not.
Don't get me wrong--it's an excellent book. But in the past year or so, I've already outgrown it's content. I've dived into the UNIX innards of OS X quite often, and you can't help but learn the basics that way. This book was really for someone who has never used UNIX before but knows a bit about Mac OS.
Well, I was baffled about why you didn't think
the title made this very clear. O'Reilly "Learning" books are for beginners (in some sense), and the title of this one is "Learning Unix for Mac OS X". What is the intended audience? Beginners. What will they learn? Unix, in the context of Mac OS X. Believe me, there
are thousands of those people around, including many who don't usually buy many computer books and therefore have not come to expect the "brick of verbosity" tomes that some
people really seem to want.
Having said that, I have to confess that I fell into a similar trap back in the day with "Learning Perl/Tk". Now there's an O'Reilly book that earned something approaching scorn in the geek community, and the reason why is because that one
really didn't have much of the audience intended (beginners wanting to learn Perl/Tk), but instead
was the only real book for *anybody* to buy that
really talked about Perl/Tk...and most of the actual buyers were complete geeks in search of something that would augment the then sparse-ish documentation for the toolkit. But all's well that ends well; we now have "Mastering Perl/Tk", and I think we're all happy again.:-)
The "UNIX Geeks" book definitely requires a read for me.
Me too. I'm guessing that this book if it turns
out to be as good as we'd hope will sell a *lot*
more copies than you might expect given the rate
of adoption by geeks of (T)iBooks. When I went
to YAPC in St. Louis, i was floored by the number
of those being used during talks...
I am not aware that he actually performed a single experiment. Aristotle regarded experimentation 'beneath right thinkers'.
This attitude is still found today in much of the social sciences and humanities, hence their uselessness.
OK, so I think this is slightly unfair. In a previous life (or so it sometimes seems...) I
was an English Literature major. As it turned out, I was one of the most unhappy English Literature majors there ever was, precisely because of the lack of empirical content in something like literary theory. Reading great
literature for its own sweet sake was very easy;
sometimes gaining insight or greater appreciation
for a work of literature or art via thoughtful
and persuasive criticism clearly also has its place. Mere arguments about the content or validity of critical theories...that was hell. The humanities are intellectual endeavors whose
use lies in the fact that they make us glad and
help us see beauty. But I have no idea how you
can make any of it empirical in and of itself, or
why you should think that critical theory could ever be improved by experiments...
Now, social sciences have different problems. In most cases, I would argue the problem is not that
social scientists don't want to do experiments but that the correct experiments to do are
difficult or impossible to execute. This
is obviously a big problem that can get compounded
by attempts to argue that flawed experiments are just as good, that minor results are far-sweeping, etc.
Frankly, another problem is that people who get very interested in the problems studied by social scientists are often tragically enough the people whose appreciation and aptitude for "real" science is not as high. (Now this is why I find economics a particularly weird field; economists usually *do* have a "hard science" orientation, but some of them are still pretty massively opposed to empirical work in their own field. Some of this has to be because good experiments would be very tough, but not all of it.)
I think a fairer statement about the social sciences is not that they are useless, but that they progress only very slowly due to the difficulty of experimentation and the massive complexity of the phenomena being studied.
Also, many apps support the use of command-tilde (that key next to the 1 and below escape) to cycle through open windows. I believe this is a Cocoa shortcut, so some apps may get it automatically from the OS.
Well, now that's semi-useful to know...let me guess; this was thoroughly documented in some file that nobody ever reads and/or only in the Public Beta, right?:-) Now the weird thing is that it
does work in Terminal.app, as you point out, but
it almost looks like they are either deprecating this mechanism, or else hired somebody to work on
Terminal.app who doesn't know about it, since the
latest version really *did* re-invent this wheel
by letting you cycle through (in either direction, granted) using command-left_arrow and command-right_arrow.
Frankly, I think the best way to get somebody to
switch to Mac OS X is to let them watch me sail around my GUI at 70 wpm on a gorgeous LCD screen.:-)
2. One desktop. Damn! How can I work with only one desktop? On my Linux box I have 4 desktops; one for email/calendar (Ximian Evolution), one for web browsers, and two for misc apps I pull up (Open Office, GAIM, etc.). How anyone can do useful work without having multiple desktops (accessible with alt-F keys) is beyond me. Is there a way to do this on the MAC. I dunno yet.
This was *my* big issue with Mac OS X until recently. Actually, my set-up was one desktop
with a 3 x 3 screen set-up (3 browser windows,
2 xterms, one emacs, one acrobat/gv, and 2 free).
I like to type in big windows with big fonts and hate Mr. Mouse. It didn't look like I could get my "old" set-up in Mac OS X. So what to do?
So here's my (surprising?) answer.
Tabbed browsing in Mozilla cures many problems. You can switch between tabs with cntrl-tab.
Command-tab cycles through open applications! I'm embarassed to admit it, but this took me forever to discover. Even better than merely cycling, it takes you back to the last app first, and highlights what it's going to show you next in the dock.
You can easily switch between multiple terminals in Terminal.app! Command-[arrow] does the trick.
What these 3 simple tricks achieve is that I can reach anything I really care about from the keyboard, just as I would with a virtual screen set-up. The advantage over those is that I don't have to map apps onto fixed virtual screen locations (or desktops). There are other things you can do to make this even cuter in some ways (learn to use "Hide" and "Hide others", get one
of the cutesy add-ons), but this works for me.
I do have to say I'm shocked about this, but it did work out that way. My big current gripe is getting decent keyboard navigation through dialogs. Through "Universal Access" you can sort of do this, but it's not elegant or easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, time will tell, but I think the new 12" PowerBook will do fabulously well. In addition to the faster G4, you get 802.11g vs 802.11b, bluetooth, S-video and VGA out, a bigger hard disk that's ATA/100, more memory, faster graphics, a lighter notebook, and QuickBooks bundled. Oddly, you don't get Firewire800. In my world, the total speed bump (which I'm guessing is substantial) is worth $300, 802.11g is worth $50, the bigger faster disk is $50 (it's a PAIN to swap an iBook disk), the memory is worth $30, and the S-video/VGA out (with true dual display) is worth $100. I personally don't care about QuickBooks. So, I think this will definitely be worth it to some people even before you get to better looks and snob appeal, although the 12 inch iBook is a beautiful product in its own right (I own one :-)). The odd computers out in this case are, I think, the 14.1" iBooks.
No tabs, no type-ahead. Some cookie control, but not as nice as Mozilla's. These are all fixable things, of course, but I'm worried that somebody will think that tabbed browsing is "not the Apple way". :-(
No tabbed browsing (killer omission) and no type-ahead features, which sucks. It is very fast, however.
One nice feature, though, is emacs-style navigation in type-in forms! Alas, that feature is a bit buggy, but I was very happy to see it.
Worst thing so far is that I couldn't post this from Safari itself since it got confused when I pressed the "Preview" button. OK, so Mozilla was also slow, but I knew something was up due to the, er, "throbber" thingie. No such beast on Safari.
Actually, those piece-wise fits aren't that great either, but even if they were, this is still a huge deal and a big difference. There is a *big* difference between an assertion that "X doubles every Y months" and the statment that "there is rapid progress in fits and starts".
Err...assuming you mean "evolution" rather than "organic growth" (since you used the term "punctuated equilibria"), I have to say that this doesn't really help your case much. The fact that there *can* be rapid innovation doesn't mean that species X has changed much at all in millions of years.
Well, the problem is that "extended" Moore's Laws are way more commmonly invoked than, um, "strict" Moore's Laws, and the problems that come up there in terms of testing them are striking because it then becomes very unclear why anybody should believe them in the first place...
Actually, there are a couple of paragraphs devoted to topics like this...but it was easy to skim over them. :-)
That's true, and I think that's interesting. First off, Moore's Law is less commonly invoked for disk drives (weirdly enough), but if I had to guess, I would expect that improvements in drive capacity on the sweet spot of the price curve might be a better exponential fit than most of the curves in the paper. Note: I have not checked this assertion, but it would be much easier to deal with than the pain involved in trying to define "computing power" or something.
Absolutely; and we know what happens next. Somebody comes up with a new and improved process or a better substrate and, boom, another round of improvement. Then the same thing happens N months down the road. Now, I think the fact that many people are missing here is that the *perception* of what is going on here can be different from the reality. The perception is that the people claiming limits we're about to hit will stop Moore's Law dead are seen as Chicken Littles who are then steam-rolled by the onslaught of new technology. In other words, the naive view is that Moore's Law is repeatedly tested, and passes the test each time. The truth is, people have such vague and inconsistent notions of what Moore's Law really is that there is no real test. An even more striking truth, made in the article quite clearly, is that there is no long-term exponential growth seen in any more concrete formulation of Moore's Law. I think some people would be surprised that Moore's Law isn't right even for the specific original case of the number of components on a minimum cost per component silicon chip.
I remember those days, too. To my eternal chagrin, I even believed some !@#$!@#$ pundit and bought a 486/33 system on the premise that faster systems would be unstable and that chip prices would go up and stay up. Oops... Now one point here is that Moore's Law (called that) seems to be an idea that took off in the 80s, and instantaneously morphed into a bunch of non-equivalent and inconsistent statements. Even the transistor version is not the original one! And the computing power version (which the article covers in detail, by the way) is a real stretch.
See my reply above; I really do think many or most non-engineers do have the kind of magical thinking you suggest is ridiculous. In particular, it is the fact the constant cries of the death of Moore's Law *seem* to be just cries of "wolf" that make the "truth" of Moore's Law appear stronger to many people, particularly including the pundit class (e.g., check out the writings of Cringely) and also to many economists (see the paper for more cites). Now the real news here is that when you do look carefully at any concrete data set, you do *not* see an exponential growth curve. In other words, Moore's Law has not really been tested since it was never really true at all.
Now, this is not to say that we will not continue to have progress, or that progress will not be at some times fairly rapid (but note that progress to date has been far less smooth than many people assume). I think it is important to note that it does *not* make sense to make assumptions about the future rate of progress.
I'll explain the segue more carefully below. But please read the article in question; I do not really believe your contention that Gordon Moore was trying to be either "somewhat humorous" or "loose". In the presentations he made on the subject, there were real graphs with real data; in the years after, he has made a point of correcting people's statements about the law (e.g., he never said anything doubles in "18 months" but rather first "1 year" and then later "2 years". I think he is whimsical about it being called a law and named after him.
OK, there are two points going on here. One is that Worldcom, the company, was a corrupt and fraud-ridden organization whose stock price went way up in a bubble economy. And you're right, that part has nothing to do with my argument. :-)
That said, there were huge numbers of companies, old and new, that suddenly saw what they believed to be a nearly limitless opportunity to build out national (and global) optical fiber networks, and (separately) others saw a huge market to work on "last mile" solutions. Now, the only way the huge fiber roll-outs would make sense is if internet traffic was increasing really, really fast. In particular, these business plans were toast unless there was a period of fast exponential growth. Worldcomm certainly did make this claim. You could see this in a number of places, but let's go for this one in Worldcomm's 1999 annual report:
Interestingly, that was a true statement at one time...but I believe only for a six-month period in about 1994 or 1995. The doubling rate has slowed way down now (which means, of course, that we are not talking about an exponential growth process, and probably never were). But, as they say, the rest is history. Now I claim the connection between Moore's Law and internet traffice (or networks) was made early and often, and you can google up the number of hits for "moore's law" and any of "optical fiber", "internet" or "last mile" and get thousands of hits. Try it and see. (Don't follow any of the links if you have a weak stomache...)
Now, wasn't this all particularly witless? Sure it was, since nobody much bothered to pay attention to the actual traffic data and say "wait a minute...". But, irrational though it may sound, people thought they had a previous piece of empirical truth about the *possibility* of exponential growth in technology, namely Moore's Law, which seemed to hold true (NOT!) for 40 years. Heck, you could even be "sophisticated" about it and claim that the fastest doublings would only hold for a period of 5 years...but of course it didn't come close to that. That's the problem with assuming an exponential.
Anyway, I hope I've cleared some stuff up. People have big troubles reasoning with exponential growth scenarios. They underestimate how badly they are being hurt by credit card debt, but do not appreciate how rare true (even temporary!) exponential growth is in many other situations.
I don't think history is on your side here. Moore's Law gets noticed and quoted precisely because it seems to be so precise; it was a statement made by an engineer about the number of components that could be fit onto a chip, and then later interpreted to be a statement that progress in that particular corner of technology was exponentially fast over an appreciable chunk of history. Exponential growth is basically something that never happens for very long, but here was a factual observation that we were doing a really good job of keeping up, and doing it for decades. But we really weren't.
I frankly don't care to get into the discussion of whether you should have called it a "Law", "Hypothesis", "Theory", "Observation", "Note", or anything else. In any case, what you would expect is that there was some concrete statement being made about technological progress (i.e., "X doubles in Y months") and that if you checked it out, you would find basic agreement of fact with the statement. As it turns out, you find that the history behind Moore's Law is really murky, and the fits to data aren't really even close for any concrete statement. Now, this would be okay if, as you say, people really did suggest this was all just a joke. But I'm not sure that it was, and, if it was just a joke, I can assure you that way too many people took it pretty seriously without checking it out. You see, the problem goes beyond whether or not the doubling time is 11 months or 42 months or what have you. The point more seriously is that the existence of something like Moore's law, which was the observation of an exponential growth process over the course of decades, gives people license to believe (and they have) that technology really will always be there to step up, or (alternatively) that (chip) technology provides a model for what other fields could hope to accomplish if only they could {fill in the nostrum here}. I find the fact that there is not now nor was there ever any big reason to believe that anything like Moore's Law fit tech data of any kind to be...striking.
Or, let me put it another way. Worldcom almost brought the entire telecomm industry to its knees by playing a similar stunt, suggesting that lots of serious investment in infrastructure was needed because the growth rate of the internet was such that the number of {bits, packets, whatever} transmitted was doubling every {small time period}. Billions in capital were essentially lost because nobody poked around hard enough to find that the data Worldcom used to support their case covered about six months of UUNet growth in the mid-90s. Why were people so completely fooled? I'd suggest part of the reason was that we had been accustomed to the notion that technological progress could be exponential, since, hey, hadn't this guy Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors you could put into a given area of silicon would double every 18 months?
As the saying goes, "the first one is free...". Seriously, people who shelled out $129 for the 10.2 upgrade know all too well that the full lifetime cost of owning a Mac is definitely greater than the upfront box cost. For that matter, the one apparently absolutely true rumor about MacWorld is that improved versions of the iApps will come out...but that there will be an upgrade cost there, too. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with attempting to charge for the upgrades, only that I wouldn't use them as my only argument for why the hardware sells at a premium. Macs cost more because people are willing to pay more, and that's basically the whole story.
(I'm deleting the software list here for space.) OK, so I think we're talking $300 for the screen, $300 for the everything else on the logic board inlcuding the modem and ethernet, $50 wholesale for the drive, $50 for the video card, $50 for the mouse and keyboard and everything else including the box. $50 for shipping and handling. That's $800. $250 for the DVD-RW drive, and we get $1050. Call it $1200 once you throw in the software. Apple's gross margins are about 25% on these I think, so now the cost is $1500. Store margin would be about 20% for these, and you get that $1800 sticker price.
If this were Dell, you'd be paying $1200 plus 10% mark-up or maybe $1350 without shipping. Now, I've replaced Mac OS X 10.2 with XP Home and the trinkets that Dell provides, and you could argue that the Apple is worth more. I wouldn't argue with that myself, but I don't believe for a minute it is because Apple is giving you a deal on the hardware. You pay the extra $400 or so because you *know* (correctly, I believe) that it is worth it to get a computer where everything truly "just works". I value my time fairly cheaply, but not cheaply enough so I want to spend 20 hours trying to get stuff to work that should work out of the box.
[About the market for an iPod with a 6" screen for maps and photos and stuff.]
I think that the market for PDAs is instructive here. People really like the idea of having all of their contacts and appointments on one. Some people really like the idea of reading email and/ or light web browsing on one. I don't really know anybody who *likes* using one to take notes, though. People also really like portable MP3 players, and like the iPod as a portable hard disc. An MP3 player with a screen usable for hand-writing recognition, the usual and unusual PDA functions, some simple games, and enough hard disc space to matter (e.g., all of your photos, all of your user files), is a big win over even a 5 pound notebook. Is the market big enough? I'm not sure, but it isn't that tiny.
Please read the article. Pretty please. It is waaay more serious than that. If the author of the article is correct, Moore's Law, in either its orginal, revised, or vastly mutated forms does not really fit ANY concrete observational data we have. This is important because exponential and sub-exponential growth rates are very different things.
No. Wrong. Sorry, try reading the *whole* article again. The BIG major point of the article, which he point out at the very beginning, by the way, is just this:
Moore's Law has never really existed in any form that is consistent or interesting to us.
It isn't "just" that the doubling times was fudged (although when you're talking about a presumably exponential process a little fudge goes a *long* way). The above bold point really breaks up into three major claims:
Seriously, it *is* a really big deal when an idea as big and as potentially important as Moore's Law turns out to have little or no substance. It is always a rude awakening when you find out that a growth process that appears to be exponential has hit some limit. It may be worse in some ways to find out that not only were you not looking at some coherent or unitary process, but that none of the obvious possibilities really ever seemed to show an exponential growth curve for more than 5 years or so.
I don't think you read this very carefully. I don't think the author cares at all about fundamental phenomena, just whether there is any testable content to various formulations of Moore's Law, and if there is something you can test, do the empirical data fit the law. Very, very embarassingly, (in my opinion) nobody much bothered to do this before, and the actual data lend very little support to any statement more concrete than "technology has improved significantly and rapidly since the invention of the IC".
It looks like about 3 people so far, but some read it more carefully than others. Please everybody who is reading this: read this article article because it is very important. Again, though, even people who have read the article (or skimmed it) appear not to have gotten the full message. So Junks Jerzey writes:
It's much worse than that, actually. When he really pulls the gloves off and looks at the hard data over the entire 43-year history of the industry, he finds *no* simple doubling time for almost any measure of interest that has been claimed to be Moore's Law or any folk version of it. Even for transistor counts. What you can sometimes sort of show is iffy exponential fits to the data for 5-10 year periods. Strikingly, though, the doubling rates for several of the measures the author investigates have *slowed*. Improvements do keep on happening, but the pace of the improvement is not as consistent or rapid as you might have expected.
Now the big deal about this is simple. Anybody who tries to project that our problems will be solved when X doubles in Y months is really walking on thin ice. It is also important because chip technology has often been held up as some special and amazing business whose success should be inspirational to us all, since it improves so fast. Clearly, improvements in raw components have been rapid (although not as rapid as you might expect), but the Big Changes caused by technology are rarely tightly coupled to the speed of improvement in underlying technology. Hey, the *big* change of the last decade is that your grandma now probably has email. I'm not sure it makes sense to calculate how many transistors that took.
OK, so this is the second prediction of Moore's Law acting on the number of stories about the end of Moore's law that will be posted on Slashdot.
I can now confidently assert that the number of comments suggesting that Moore's Law will act on the number of stories about the end of Moore's Law that will be posted on Slashdot will itself be subject to Moore's Law.
Worse than that, the number of snide comments pointing out that Moore's Law governs the number of comments suggesting that Moore's Law applies to the number of stories on Slashdot asserting that the end of Moore's Law will also follow Moore's Law. Thankfully, there's only one of *these* this time, but God help us 10 years from now. :-)
Um... You'd better hope that saving to XML loses some formatting information, since that's the whole point of *ML approaches: to separate content from presentation. A more charitable reading of what you say is that the style sheet you need to apply to the XML to render a Word document might be crippled. Could be.
Frankly, though, I suspect that the *opposite* thing will occur. The style sheets won't be crippled, rather, they will be absolutely wonderful. So good, in fact, that you would not want to do without them. So powerful, that you will want to re-do your entire website in Word XML just to use them, and allow users complete transparency in going to-and-fro. Regular HTML and will become scarce on the web. PDF will also be seen as less necessary.
Of course, there might be a catch or two...like, the style sheets will never be publicly available, and you will not be allowed to use them from a non-MS browser, and the XSLT that allows you to export to html and pdf won't work quite right...
As always, you have to be very careful about what you ask for, since you might just get it.
OK, but mathematicians can usually only prove things about what we might "bodily functions" when they consider what goes on in tiny local neighborhoods that are only frequented by other mathematicians. :-)
Speak for yourself, Mr. Snide. Both are sciences, albeit really difficult ones to do good work in. But the best work in Psychology at least is stuff that can be envied by any experimental scientist.
Sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean here. As a share of GDP, the 1999 figures I'm familiar with say it's 29%. Furthermore, you are going to have to do a lot to convince me that this amount of increase is a bad thing. Life expectancies are way up, poverty is way down, education has improved for the vast majority, and we are no longer the same country we once were in almost any sense. I think it is healthy to debate our government funding priorities, and I know there is money being spent I would rather were not spent. But if you make me pick between 2002 and 1902, the choice is too easy. And if you argue that we've made all of this progress completely in spite of the government, I'm afraid to say I would like to see a lot of specific evidence that this is true.
I understand that you were responding to a comment that was surreal at best, but I could not really let this pass.
The problem with proofs (economic or otherwise) is that they can only be used "in real life" when the axiomatic system and additional assumptions that underlie them are sufficiently close to reality. Hayek got a Nobel in Economics not for what a lot of Hayek fans think he did, but for a fairly general argument about the availability of relevant information to economic planners and their ability to set prices. It really is and was a useful result.
Interestingly, this year's winners of the Nobel in Economics were pioneers in the use of actual experimental data to address issues that were crucial to economics, and one of them was a card-carrying psychologist. I doubt this will create any huge shift in how economists do most of what they do, but I think that it is important to note that there is and will be a more empirical kind of economics being done that might make the science a bit less "Ivory Tower" than it has been.
Now, something that really worries me about the current line-up of Nobel Prizes is the extent to which the amount of actual science being done has "drifted" away from the set prize categories. I think this is particularly true for the "Medicine or Physiology" Prize, which is basically the only one anybody in medicine or any biological science can ever hope to win. To be completely frank about it, there are waaay more deserving potential recipients in those fields these days than can ever possibly win given the current rules. The pure science of Biology has absolutely exploded in importance in the last half century, and Medicine has made breath-taking progress as well, but the prizes were set up a century ago, so everybody has to queue up in these two vast fields. I can't help thinking that if Nobel were establishing the Prizes today, that this and similar problems would be fixed somehow. In the mean time, it's clear to me that while there are certainly some psychologists who would be deserving of a Nobel Prize (and Kahneman was among them), the field as a whole really has not yet reached the point where amazing progress is a yearly event, to the point where ignoring the field prize-wise is anything like the embarassing situation in the life sciences.
Chimp DNA is being worked on right now; not sure of the ETA, but you can be certain that this will make a big splash when even a draft sequence is released. Most comparison made between chimp and human DNA so far have either been simple hybridization experiments, or comparisons of tens (now hundreds) of genes sequenced in both species. The short story is: wow, these genomes are close, but on the other hand we are *rather* different from chimps in many ways that matter quite a lot.
"Disc cameras" were the 80s. Very 80s. I worked in a massive photo developing operation as a summer job in the early 80s, and a reasonable portion of our workload was the disc stuff. All I can say there is: eeeuw! The size of the negative on those was miniscule, and the prints *all* looked pretty sucky in comparison to almost anything else (a really bad 110 was worse). The only advantage/claim to fame of the disc film media was that the film was, of course, perfectly flat, so that in theory you could achieve arbitrarily good focus...but then you gave all of that up and more for the teeny tiny negative image. Plus, you had identically 15 snaps per disc.
That said, I personally *liked* to work with the disc stuff (I was a print cutter/packager type) precisely because nobody else liked it, so the "standard" for cutting those prints was set so low that I could work at 200% of standard for those runs and either look really good or relax a bit on some of the other stuff.
Do you mean the "explaining why you might want to learn about Unix" part, or do you mean that the book doesn't do a good job of teaching parts of Unix that are of interest to most users of OS X? If it's the latter, I would agree that most Mac OS X users probably don't care; they're going to buy the "Missing Manual" series or something. If it's the former, that might be more of a problem.
My guess is that the average reader of this book is somebody who was really into Mac OS X, and then saw somebody perform a Unix command line magic trick that saved tham a whole day's work. This does happen, and it does have an effect on the witnesses, who then go forth, intrigued, to the bookstore. But, lo: the Unix books are written for the high priests! Ah, here's a book for an acolyte like me...it even says "Mac OS X" in the title. :-)
Time will tell if there really is an audience for this or not.
Well, I was baffled about why you didn't think the title made this very clear. O'Reilly "Learning" books are for beginners (in some sense), and the title of this one is "Learning Unix for Mac OS X". What is the intended audience? Beginners. What will they learn? Unix, in the context of Mac OS X. Believe me, there are thousands of those people around, including many who don't usually buy many computer books and therefore have not come to expect the "brick of verbosity" tomes that some people really seem to want.
Having said that, I have to confess that I fell into a similar trap back in the day with "Learning Perl/Tk". Now there's an O'Reilly book that earned something approaching scorn in the geek community, and the reason why is because that one really didn't have much of the audience intended (beginners wanting to learn Perl/Tk), but instead was the only real book for *anybody* to buy that really talked about Perl/Tk...and most of the actual buyers were complete geeks in search of something that would augment the then sparse-ish documentation for the toolkit. But all's well that ends well; we now have "Mastering Perl/Tk", and I think we're all happy again. :-)
Me too. I'm guessing that this book if it turns out to be as good as we'd hope will sell a *lot* more copies than you might expect given the rate of adoption by geeks of (T)iBooks. When I went to YAPC in St. Louis, i was floored by the number of those being used during talks...
OK, so I think this is slightly unfair. In a previous life (or so it sometimes seems...) I was an English Literature major. As it turned out, I was one of the most unhappy English Literature majors there ever was, precisely because of the lack of empirical content in something like literary theory. Reading great literature for its own sweet sake was very easy; sometimes gaining insight or greater appreciation for a work of literature or art via thoughtful and persuasive criticism clearly also has its place. Mere arguments about the content or validity of critical theories...that was hell. The humanities are intellectual endeavors whose use lies in the fact that they make us glad and help us see beauty. But I have no idea how you can make any of it empirical in and of itself, or why you should think that critical theory could ever be improved by experiments...
Now, social sciences have different problems. In most cases, I would argue the problem is not that social scientists don't want to do experiments but that the correct experiments to do are difficult or impossible to execute. This is obviously a big problem that can get compounded by attempts to argue that flawed experiments are just as good, that minor results are far-sweeping, etc.
Frankly, another problem is that people who get very interested in the problems studied by social scientists are often tragically enough the people whose appreciation and aptitude for "real" science is not as high. (Now this is why I find economics a particularly weird field; economists usually *do* have a "hard science" orientation, but some of them are still pretty massively opposed to empirical work in their own field. Some of this has to be because good experiments would be very tough, but not all of it.)
I think a fairer statement about the social sciences is not that they are useless, but that they progress only very slowly due to the difficulty of experimentation and the massive complexity of the phenomena being studied.
Well, now that's semi-useful to know...let me guess; this was thoroughly documented in some file that nobody ever reads and/or only in the Public Beta, right? :-) Now the weird thing is that it
does work in Terminal.app, as you point out, but
it almost looks like they are either deprecating this mechanism, or else hired somebody to work on
Terminal.app who doesn't know about it, since the
latest version really *did* re-invent this wheel
by letting you cycle through (in either direction, granted) using command-left_arrow and command-right_arrow.
Frankly, I think the best way to get somebody to switch to Mac OS X is to let them watch me sail around my GUI at 70 wpm on a gorgeous LCD screen. :-)
This was *my* big issue with Mac OS X until recently. Actually, my set-up was one desktop with a 3 x 3 screen set-up (3 browser windows, 2 xterms, one emacs, one acrobat/gv, and 2 free). I like to type in big windows with big fonts and hate Mr. Mouse. It didn't look like I could get my "old" set-up in Mac OS X. So what to do?
So here's my (surprising?) answer.
What these 3 simple tricks achieve is that I can reach anything I really care about from the keyboard, just as I would with a virtual screen set-up. The advantage over those is that I don't have to map apps onto fixed virtual screen locations (or desktops). There are other things you can do to make this even cuter in some ways (learn to use "Hide" and "Hide others", get one of the cutesy add-ons), but this works for me.
I do have to say I'm shocked about this, but it did work out that way. My big current gripe is getting decent keyboard navigation through dialogs. Through "Universal Access" you can sort of do this, but it's not elegant or easy.