What are the hidden costs in productivity losses when you have how many thousands of people spending time (to sit in front of their computers) and money (to buy blank discs) when a run of pressed CDs (with no jewel cases or anything) costs mere cents each.
The comparison I've outlined is between a late model Sony VAIO and a MacBook Pro.
Taking the Mac out of the box, booting it up, going through the registration assistant and getting to a desktop where I can start working - 5 minutes.
With the Sony, it takes around 15-20 minutes to get to the same stage, most of that sitting at a black screen while Windows prepares itself, and then another 2 hours to burn the recovery media, which ties up the optical drive so I can't start installing any software until this has completed.
5 minutes versus something like 150 minutes until you can start installing software to make your machine usable out of the box.
Multiply this out by the number of people who must go through this process and the time wasted is absolutely insane. Why can't they at least image the machine in the factory and boot it once so that Windows does all it's preparation before you get the machine, or image the machine with a specific machine image that's already prepared, rather than image it with a generic image that has to install itself at first boot?
Greg Egan has explored a lot of concepts around the nature of existence and self, and what it means to be you when you are simulated on a computer, or run on a backup processor in your head... He's a programmer by trade so has a very solid understanding of the concepts behind it all and he's got a rather advanced understanding of mathematics which also shines through in his work.
I highly recommend checking out some of his earlier works. If you're into maths and physics, then some of his later works, in particular Incandesence details life in a non-Newtonian reference frame and working out physical laws of the universe from first principles.
He's got a very rich back catalogue. His earlier works are a fair bit more accessible than some of his later stuff, less maths involved and you can see a definite progression as you work forward from his earlier works to those written later in his career. The collections of short stories are well worth picking up, some of his short stories pack as much into them as other authors manage to fit into an entire novel.
This book, Permutation City blew my mind when I first read it in the mid 90's. The end game is a cellular automaton that is complex enough to simulate life on a physical level... I'm not going to spoil it any more, get a copy and read it.
Because it's like a console. To UNIX and *NIX people, this is very cool. I suppo rt his posting in monotype, and encourage him to continue doing so. Long live th e console!
A lot of modern tape drives have a read head positioned immediately following the write head, so they continuously read back what they've written to verify that what's on the tape is what you intended to put on the tape.
Quite simple but if you don't "get" the numbers then as said I don't think switching units will help much. And if US citizens switched to gallons per 10 mile or something such they would just be like "wtf? What's that in MPG?", and if you switched to km instead of miles and liter instead of gallons you would just always think "150 km left? That's.. uhm.. slightly less than 10 miles then.." and "I wonder how many liter this tank holds?"
I couldn't agree more with you on this point. You have completely nailed it there.
Yes, and with usage measured in volume per distance, it's a simple and direct linear relationship.
It's like comparing two sets of items, one pair cost $10 and $20 and the other pair costs $33 and $50.
If you buy the first of each pair, then which is a greater saving - it's the one where you get the $33 item instead of the $50 item. This saves $17 as opposed to the first option where you only save $10.
With MPG however, it's the other way around - you save more petrol by going from 10mpg to 20mpg.
If I can replace a 50l/100km car with one that uses 33l/100km or I can replace one that uses 20l/100km with one that uses 10l/100km (never mind that those figures are nothing like you'd see in reality) then I will save more petrol by going from 50l/100km to 33l/100km - every kilometer I drive, I will save 17l, whereas in the second example for every km I drive, I'll save 10l.
It's a much simpler, linear relationship with how far I travel, which tends to be a constant, and how much fuel I consume, rather than how far will a given quantity of fuel take me.
Percentages aren't that relevant to this - it's absolute fuel consumption that matters.
If you have a device that saves 1L per 100km, then for every 100km you travel, you will save $1.30 (or whatever fuel happens to be) This is the same saving whether you're a road train or a vespa scooter.
As a proportion of your fuel bill, it will be less for the road train, but the end saving is the same in either case, and the net reduction in fuel usage is the same as well.
Sure, you don't _have_ to use metric units in the USA, going from MPG to gallons per 100 miles (or something similar) will still have the same benefit in being able to easily gauge relative consumptions of different vehicles, rather than it being an inverse 1/x scale which is relatively hard to judge in your head (compared to a linear scale like volume per distance)
What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested... Having Amiga-like experience. Is that so hard to guess?...
Yes, and what can you do with an Amiga-like experience (come on, the GUI, while it was innovative for it's time has nothing on Windows 7 or OS X) that can't be done more easily with a modern OS. If you're the kind of person that knows Workbench back-to-front and inside-out, and haven't learnt anything else in the intervening 15-odd years, then I'm sorry, but it's time to move on ^_^
Is there any Amiga-only software that is worth running today that doesn't depend on the custom hardware in the Amiga, is there any software that does anything useful that hasn't been ported or replicated on another platform?
Now, I'm not trying to troll here and I genuinely loved the Amiga, back in the day, but why on earth would anyone want to run an Amiga-compatible OS these days?
Can the modern Amiga OS run old Amiga software? Could I really fire up my old copy of Alien Breed, Titus the Fox or some of the old mega demos?
What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested...
I'd say, at present, that 250GB is a pretty hugely high data cap for a home user.
At 4GB per movie, this is 2 movies per day. I'd love to have the time to watch that many movies, and I'd love for there to be that many movies worth watching.
At 6MB per MP3, this is over 40 thousand tracks per month. There aren't enough hours in the day to listen to this much music.
It's an essentially unlimited amount of web browsing, even if you're watching YouTube 24 hours a day.
It's my favourite Linux distro, 60 times over. They don't update it this frequently.
It's all the software updates that the many computers in my house could possibly download, with this maybe using up 1%
What else, if not p2p downloads of movies and large software installers, are you burning through 250GB a month with? I am genuinely curious, maybe there's something out there on the internet I'm missing out on!
Really? You'd prefer a slow, uncapped connection to a high speed connection with a massively high data cap, such as a quarter of a terabyte per month?
Fuck that, I'd go for a fast connection with 250GB limit any day. I have to try hard to download more than 50-60GB per month. What I want is more speed.
Man, that brings back memories. I remember in the early 90's when I heard that wuarchive was being upgraded to have a... wait for it... a 14GB hard drive (although in retrospect it was probably a RAID array rather than a single spindle) and I was simply dumbfounded by that amount of storage and wondered how on earth they'd ever fill it.
I don't know about VirtualBox, but Parallels have a bare metal virtualisation solution that runs on Apple Xserve hardware, and is capable of virtualising Mac OS X Server.
The Macintosh hardware contains one chip containing a key, and MacOS X checks for the existence of the key. Now with virtualisation, the virtualisation level _must_ pass access to this chip down to the real hardware, otherwise MacOS X won't install. Passing the access through to the real chip is legal, because it only allows the end user what the license allowed him or her to do anyway.
Macs do not use a TPM chip to control whether or not you can use OS X on them. Newer Macs don't even have a TPM chip on board.
It is obviously not difficult at all for the virtualisation software to emulate the presence of this chip. If they did that, then you could run MacOS X on _any_ computer.
The whole idea of a TPM chip is exactly that you can't do this - it's got secret cryptographic keys burned into it that are never exposed to the host OS, and they can't be virtualised.
OS X checks for an EFI firmware (not a functioning one either, just an EFI firmware that responds to a few calls) and boots on that.
It can also boot on a machine with a regular BIOS - in fact VMware Fusion 1 and 2 used a fairly generic BIOS image in the darwin.iso that it boots from, it wasn't until VMware Fusion 3 that the darwin.iso contained a full EFI implementation.
This announcement doesn't mean that IE9 will not support plugins, especially Flash. What this announcement means is that IE9 will natively play back H.264 video, with no additional codecs or plugins required. You'll be able to insert a video element into your html5 and IE9 will deal with it. They're not doing anything to stop Flash from working, Flash will still be a plugin for IE9.
It means that Microsoft aren't doing anything stupid like saying they'll support the video tag, but only with videos in WMV, or in ogg theora or anything like that - they're committing to native support for h.264.
As I understand it The PS3 ownership model doesn't seem to really do anything at all, so as another poster mentioned you can basically share PSN Games and DLC with abandon.
For reasonably small definitions of "with abandon". You can download content five times.
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I've written about the Out of Box Experience differences between a Mac and a PC.
What are the hidden costs in productivity losses when you have how many thousands of people spending time (to sit in front of their computers) and money (to buy blank discs) when a run of pressed CDs (with no jewel cases or anything) costs mere cents each.
The comparison I've outlined is between a late model Sony VAIO and a MacBook Pro.
Taking the Mac out of the box, booting it up, going through the registration assistant and getting to a desktop where I can start working - 5 minutes.
With the Sony, it takes around 15-20 minutes to get to the same stage, most of that sitting at a black screen while Windows prepares itself, and then another 2 hours to burn the recovery media, which ties up the optical drive so I can't start installing any software until this has completed.
5 minutes versus something like 150 minutes until you can start installing software to make your machine usable out of the box.
Multiply this out by the number of people who must go through this process and the time wasted is absolutely insane. Why can't they at least image the machine in the factory and boot it once so that Windows does all it's preparation before you get the machine, or image the machine with a specific machine image that's already prepared, rather than image it with a generic image that has to install itself at first boot?
He's the one who's not Mr Clock.
Greg Egan has explored a lot of concepts around the nature of existence and self, and what it means to be you when you are simulated on a computer, or run on a backup processor in your head... He's a programmer by trade so has a very solid understanding of the concepts behind it all and he's got a rather advanced understanding of mathematics which also shines through in his work.
I highly recommend checking out some of his earlier works. If you're into maths and physics, then some of his later works, in particular Incandesence details life in a non-Newtonian reference frame and working out physical laws of the universe from first principles.
He's got a very rich back catalogue. His earlier works are a fair bit more accessible than some of his later stuff, less maths involved and you can see a definite progression as you work forward from his earlier works to those written later in his career. The collections of short stories are well worth picking up, some of his short stories pack as much into them as other authors manage to fit into an entire novel.
This book, Permutation City blew my mind when I first read it in the mid 90's. The end game is a cellular automaton that is complex enough to simulate life on a physical level... I'm not going to spoil it any more, get a copy and read it.
Check it out on The Book Depository
Don't you mean:
Because it's like a console. To UNIX and *NIX people, this is very cool. I suppo
rt his posting in monotype, and encourage him to continue doing so. Long live th
e console!
Oh, you go and store 17PB on LTO and you think you know it all do you?
I'll just duck off to my corner and resume setting up my 8-slot autoloader.
As you were...
A lot of modern tape drives have a read head positioned immediately following the write head, so they continuously read back what they've written to verify that what's on the tape is what you intended to put on the tape.
Here's a primer on LTO technology
...if you are using tape backup, you better have multiple backups.
Yes, you got it in one. That's the whole idea of tape based backups. Redundancy.
Quite simple but if you don't "get" the numbers then as said I don't think switching units will help much. And if US citizens switched to gallons per 10 mile or something such they would just be like "wtf? What's that in MPG?", and if you switched to km instead of miles and liter instead of gallons you would just always think "150 km left? That's.. uhm.. slightly less than 10 miles then .." and "I wonder how many liter this tank holds?"
I couldn't agree more with you on this point. You have completely nailed it there.
Yes, and with usage measured in volume per distance, it's a simple and direct linear relationship.
It's like comparing two sets of items, one pair cost $10 and $20 and the other pair costs $33 and $50.
If you buy the first of each pair, then which is a greater saving - it's the one where you get the $33 item instead of the $50 item. This saves $17 as opposed to the first option where you only save $10.
With MPG however, it's the other way around - you save more petrol by going from 10mpg to 20mpg.
If I can replace a 50l/100km car with one that uses 33l/100km or I can replace one that uses 20l/100km with one that uses 10l/100km (never mind that those figures are nothing like you'd see in reality) then I will save more petrol by going from 50l/100km to 33l/100km - every kilometer I drive, I will save 17l, whereas in the second example for every km I drive, I'll save 10l.
It's a much simpler, linear relationship with how far I travel, which tends to be a constant, and how much fuel I consume, rather than how far will a given quantity of fuel take me.
Percentages aren't that relevant to this - it's absolute fuel consumption that matters.
If you have a device that saves 1L per 100km, then for every 100km you travel, you will save $1.30 (or whatever fuel happens to be)
This is the same saving whether you're a road train or a vespa scooter.
As a proportion of your fuel bill, it will be less for the road train, but the end saving is the same in either case, and the net reduction in fuel usage is the same as well.
Sure, you don't _have_ to use metric units in the USA, going from MPG to gallons per 100 miles (or something similar) will still have the same benefit in being able to easily gauge relative consumptions of different vehicles, rather than it being an inverse 1/x scale which is relatively hard to judge in your head (compared to a linear scale like volume per distance)
What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested...
Having Amiga-like experience. Is that so hard to guess?...
Yes, and what can you do with an Amiga-like experience (come on, the GUI, while it was innovative for it's time has nothing on Windows 7 or OS X) that can't be done more easily with a modern OS. If you're the kind of person that knows Workbench back-to-front and inside-out, and haven't learnt anything else in the intervening 15-odd years, then I'm sorry, but it's time to move on ^_^
Is there any Amiga-only software that is worth running today that doesn't depend on the custom hardware in the Amiga, is there any software that does anything useful that hasn't been ported or replicated on another platform?
Now, I'm not trying to troll here and I genuinely loved the Amiga, back in the day, but why on earth would anyone want to run an Amiga-compatible OS these days?
Can the modern Amiga OS run old Amiga software? Could I really fire up my old copy of Alien Breed, Titus the Fox or some of the old mega demos?
What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested...
I'd say, at present, that 250GB is a pretty hugely high data cap for a home user.
At 4GB per movie, this is 2 movies per day. I'd love to have the time to watch that many movies, and I'd love for there to be that many movies worth watching.
At 6MB per MP3, this is over 40 thousand tracks per month. There aren't enough hours in the day to listen to this much music.
It's an essentially unlimited amount of web browsing, even if you're watching YouTube 24 hours a day.
It's my favourite Linux distro, 60 times over. They don't update it this frequently.
It's all the software updates that the many computers in my house could possibly download, with this maybe using up 1%
What else, if not p2p downloads of movies and large software installers, are you burning through 250GB a month with? I am genuinely curious, maybe there's something out there on the internet I'm missing out on!
Really? You'd prefer a slow, uncapped connection to a high speed connection with a massively high data cap, such as a quarter of a terabyte per month?
Fuck that, I'd go for a fast connection with 250GB limit any day. I have to try hard to download more than 50-60GB per month. What I want is more speed.
Man, that brings back memories. I remember in the early 90's when I heard that wuarchive was being upgraded to have a... wait for it... a 14GB hard drive (although in retrospect it was probably a RAID array rather than a single spindle) and I was simply dumbfounded by that amount of storage and wondered how on earth they'd ever fill it.
Now, my phone has more storage than that...
I'm sorry, I lost you at
My workstation boots off a 128GB chunk of solid-state storage - I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't know about VirtualBox, but Parallels have a bare metal virtualisation solution that runs on Apple Xserve hardware, and is capable of virtualising Mac OS X Server.
The Macintosh hardware contains one chip containing a key, and MacOS X checks for the existence of the key. Now with virtualisation, the virtualisation level _must_ pass access to this chip down to the real hardware, otherwise MacOS X won't install. Passing the access through to the real chip is legal, because it only allows the end user what the license allowed him or her to do anyway.
Macs do not use a TPM chip to control whether or not you can use OS X on them. Newer Macs don't even have a TPM chip on board.
It is obviously not difficult at all for the virtualisation software to emulate the presence of this chip. If they did that, then you could run MacOS X on _any_ computer.
The whole idea of a TPM chip is exactly that you can't do this - it's got secret cryptographic keys burned into it that are never exposed to the host OS, and they can't be virtualised.
The Macintosh hardware contains one chip containing a key, and MacOS X checks for the existence of the key.
No it doesn't
OS X checks for an EFI firmware (not a functioning one either, just an EFI firmware that responds to a few calls) and boots on that.
It can also boot on a machine with a regular BIOS - in fact VMware Fusion 1 and 2 used a fairly generic BIOS image in the darwin.iso that it boots from, it wasn't until VMware Fusion 3 that the darwin.iso contained a full EFI implementation.
This announcement doesn't mean that IE9 will not support plugins, especially Flash.
What this announcement means is that IE9 will natively play back H.264 video, with no additional codecs or plugins required. You'll be able to insert a video element into your html5 and IE9 will deal with it.
They're not doing anything to stop Flash from working, Flash will still be a plugin for IE9.
It means that Microsoft aren't doing anything stupid like saying they'll support the video tag, but only with videos in WMV, or in ogg theora or anything like that - they're committing to native support for h.264.
Exactly!
As I understand it The PS3 ownership model doesn't seem to really do anything at all, so as another poster mentioned you can basically share PSN Games and DLC with abandon.
For reasonably small definitions of "with abandon". You can download content five times.