Let's see someone yank out an eyeball, cause bleeding, and then shut down your other eye with an iron brand, and see if you can imagine yourself complaining of brain damage.
To be fair, we'll administer anesthetic, as I'm sure yanking an electrode and power cycling is nowhere near as painful as pulling an eyeball or burning your cornea.
He didn't say there *was* brain damage, if you read the report, only that it was *possible* if he didn't reconnect quickly/soon.
Not necessarily brain damage in the mental retardation sense, but brain damange in the 'neural stimulus has been removed, neurons and neural connections will die and wither due to lack of use/stimulus/feedback' damage, which is still damage.
Another analogy, a better analogy:
You have become very accustomed to your normal eyesight. Imagine someone giving you very powerful glasses to wear for years (akin to his implants), and then Canadian airport security ripping them from your face, tearing the skin off your noise and brow.
Will you suffer brain damage? You will certainly suffer visual problems, and until your brain becomes accustomed to not wearing glasses (if possible) or if you regain your glasses, your brain, body, coordination, and vision will most certainly be affected.
They have a whole friggin open source OS (Darwin) which they have grafted their own closed source technology (displayPDF, QuickTime, CoreAudio, etc), and are selling for $130, or bundling with their Macs.
They also have an open source Darwin Streaming Server, and a complementary closed source QuickTime Streaming Server. They bundle Apache as their HTTP server, as well.
What can Microsoft do that would be similar?
How about release the DirectX library as open source? However, use their own in house optimization-compilation technology to ensure that their own DX libs are 10% or 15% faster than anything out there... IE, outinnovate the competition, themselves?
Or release their older Office programs as open source? Sell newer, more advanced copies, but allow the general public to self support and modify their older versions? Of course, again, the key is to out innovate yourself to convince people to buy the newest version instead of incrementally updating and fixing the older, free source version.
Or rather, release a Office Core, which allows you to compile a very basic Office devoid of nifty features... though this might backfire, as people don't generally use 80% of the features in Office, do they?
Sorry, I clicked on tech specs: http://www.iomega.com/nas/nas_tech2.html It mentioned 10bT/100bT, and nowhere 1000bT. It didn't occur to me to scan through every variation to see that the highest end model *did* have 1000bT when the lower end ones did not.
And doesn't GigE give you more connections at the same bandwidth, rather than significantly higher bandwidth with only one connection?
It weighs 4.9lbs (much less than your 9 lb weight requirement), is a rubber mounted (drive and electronics), magnesium alloy framed (for lightness, rigidity, and strength), polycarbonate covered (bulletproof? Probably not.) laptop that you can probably use to stop knife wielding attackers and then write up the incident up in your online journal while wirelessly surfing the net at your local Starbucks.
You think I'm joking, but I'm not. You could probably stop a knife with your iBook, whack the attacker in the head with it, and then walk away with a working iBook:)
To make it even more AI-like, if the driver has certain preferences, the AI-cruise control should be able to pick up on those preferences.
If the driver goes into certain curves at 30mph, and other curves at 15mph, the AI should be able to tell the difference between those curves, and in future sense modify it's behavior appropriately. IE, a trainable AI.
As long as the problem can be phrased such that the human can do a better job than a computer (such as cruise control), then it is an AI problem. Right now cruise control is merely computer assisted driving, but it is on no way a solved AI problem.
In a very bottom's up biological intelligence thing (animal reasoning), cruise control *can* be (I don't know if it *is) structured as an AI thing.
You have two analog controls, gas and brake. You have time; how long to break, how long to accelerate; you have intensity, or magnitude, how much gas and how much brake pressure, and then you have current velocity, current RPM, current gear, and even mass to take into account, not to mention road curvature, road quality, and road grade (steepness).
In this light, it's a very valid AI question. Can you create a system that maximizes fuel economy and ride quality (you want to avoid extreme acceleration and deceleration, right?).
I know for a fact that I can outperform my car's cruise control for both milage, performance, and ride quality. As long as I can perform better than my car, then the car isn't being intelligent enough, and is therefore an AI quality problem.
To be more precise:
If you're on a down grade and you're below the threshold speed, you can let the car coast and naturally accelerate. If you're above the threshold speed, you need to actually slow below the threshold speed to take into account the fact that there is acceleration as a factor. Or instead of braking, the car can shift into a lower gear, alternating with braking, to insure brakes don't overheat.
Then there's curvature. The car should actually decelerate going into a curve; it should do so more aggressively the tighter the curve, but as the driver starts straightening it should accelerate again. How much should it slow down? How much should it accelerate? It's not linear, but depends strongly on how banked the road is and what the road conditions are. Wet vs dry, or even icy, for example.
Or going uphill. The car should accelerate to counter the speed drop, but should probably try to stay in the best gear, even if it means falling below the threshold for a while, because of fuel economy and power output. So it should accelerate somewhat, but be able to decide that staying in 5th at 70mph isn't nearly as good as dropping to 4th and going 63mph if the grade is steep enough. It should probably also be able to check engine temperature to guage when to keep going 70mph, and when to switch to a lower gear and drop to 63mph (loong shallow grade vs small, if steeper, hill, for example)
See, right now cruise control is really only best for straight sections of clear road because not enough AI has been applied, and not enough AI is available, to deal with curvy windy uphill and downhill roads, which is actually a better place for AI to be used, allowing the driver to concentrate on where the car is going (not over the cliff, I hope)!
The iBook is covered in polycarbonate plastic. The same stuff they use in ultra hard shatter resistent eyeglasses and in bulletproof glass.
Unless you're carrying steel surgical instruments and diamond cutting blades in the bottom of your briefcase or in your backpack, the iBook will probably suffer, at most, cosmetic scratches from the run of the mill stuff.
Alloys will deform *and stay that way* where the polycarbonate will flex and return it's shape. The iBook itself has a polycarbonate shell, a magnesium frame (you wanted alloys? you got it), rubber mounting for the drives and other components, and it's got an extra sturdy hinge for the screen.
The only stronger laptop I can imagine would be the Panasonic ToughBooks. Everything else I've seen (even my Titanium PowerBook) pales in comparison to an iBook.
It's actually called a tariff. That $600 tariff means that he doesn't have associate with the likes of you, who wouldn't or couldn't actually pay the $600 tariff. It's sort of like protection money; he gives Apple $600, and Apple makes sure you never bother him since you won't be using the same computing or hardware platform.
I suspect Apple is now making $200 per iPod. The Firefly from SmartDisk uses the same 5gb disk mechanism as the iPod and sells for $200 vs the iPod's $400
6 months ago, the Firefly was $400 and the iPod is $400. Apple must now be picking up the difference:)
640x480 is almost a third of the pixels of 1024x768! You're moving a third less data to the screen; actually, considering that there's double buffering and compositing and blending, more like over half as much data, or more, on the KDE machine. Bump it up to 1024x768 first:)
That an OS X would require Apple hardware regardless of the processor, and that the processor would therefore matter little in the choice of buying a Mac (or not), barring performance differences between 2x1GHz and 2.2GHz
Apple evidently thinks the market of people *almost* convinced is much, much, easier and much, much, bigger than you do.
Makes sense. It's always easier to convince someone who wants to be convinced than to sell to someone who isn't even looking.
As long as Apple targets both; the ones who consider but turn away, and the ones who would never consider, they cover all their bases.
I myself am the only Mac user out of a group of 14 or so people, but 2 of them had considered, and one of them outright rejected. 2 more had not even considered, and had bought Dells. So of the 5, Apple would have the easiest time grabbing the two that had considered- in doing so, they are laying the groundwork for the 2 that hadn't, because the fears, objections, or misconceptions that they may have had would have been dealt with by the first pair already.
Anyway, we do have a source of unlimited free energy: the sun.
It's harnessing it that's the problem, of course.
We can't ultimately pour more energy into our world than the sun already does. The whole point of greenhouse gasses is that we can modify the distribution of the atmosphere so that certain.. side effects occur; like global warming/cooling, as an example.
We really can't destroy the earth, at this point, but we can certainly destroy our home, which to a very large degree *is* synonmyous with the earth.
10W of heat is generated to convert water to steam. Said steam runs a turbine to produce 10W of electrical energy. Assuming no loss in transfer, that 10W get sent to you to power lights, your PC, your heater, etc. Eventually, in the act of being used, all 10W of electrical power gets transformed into heat.
I didn't say all heat based power stations must be 50% efficient, and I'm not sure that's what the original poster was implying. Just that all 10W generated must be flushed into the environment at the end of the day. The only reason this isn't a zero sum game is that the sun pumps so much more excess energy into our world than we can spend that, assuming high enough efficiency, we can operate until the sun dies.
It's physics. Everything gets converted to heat, eventually. Any energy transfer.
Also, it's a note on how power plants work. Most of them operate off steam generators. Moving steam moves turbines produces electricity.
How do you generate steam? Heat. To produce 10W of electrical energy, *at* least 10W of heat must be produced to move the steam, assuming 100% efficiency. 50% efficiency means 20W of heat.
Essentially it means that radioactive waste can be recycled. Bombarding it with laser induced neutrons can force it to fizz until it is no longer radioactive, while hopefully still generating more energy than the laser costs to run. A second benefit is that nuclear plants no longer need to maintain critical mass. Turn on the laser, and watch the nuclear reaction go, turn off the laser, and see it stop!
Essentially it means that radioactive waste can be recycled. Bombarding it with laser induced neutrons can force it to fizz until it is no longer radioactive, while hopefully still generating more energy than the laser costs to run. A second benefit is that nuclear plants no longer need to maintain critical mass. Turn on the laser, and watch the nuclear reaction go, turn off the laser, and see it stop!
If it's going to modify your system, it will ask you for your password; if it resides entirely in userspace, it won't.
So you won't get 'services' and such, but you can get junk you didn't ask for. However, this junk can easily be prevented, again, with the Unix permissions model that OS X uses.
Maybe so:) When my CPU is at 100% for long periods (like compiling Mozilla in the background or rendering iMovie projects), the fan kicks in and is fairly noisy.
But in day to day useage, the fan never kicks in. The keyboard, the mouse click, and the occasional drive seek make the most noise, in that order, followed by the fan.
Anyway, I hope you like OS X. It's such a pretty system, and clean, and cool:)
When they say NJ has no water table, that means there's no money left in the bank... The area is living hand to mouth here.
Water in the ground is like money in the bank. If there's any sort of disruption (manmade, natural, catastrophe, or otherwise), THERE IS NO WATER.
So... you in NJ with decent roads, better and bigger facilities and housing, but absolutely no water. What would you do? Nothing to drink with, nothing to bathe with, nothing to clean with...
Or rather, there *would* be water, but you may not be able to afford to use it, if it's priced like milk or gas:)
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see someone yank out an eyeball, cause bleeding, and then shut down your other eye with an iron brand, and see if you can imagine yourself complaining of brain damage.
To be fair, we'll administer anesthetic, as I'm sure yanking an electrode and power cycling is nowhere near as painful as pulling an eyeball or burning your cornea.
He didn't say there *was* brain damage, if you read the report, only that it was *possible* if he didn't reconnect quickly/soon.
Not necessarily brain damage in the mental retardation sense, but brain damange in the 'neural stimulus has been removed, neurons and neural connections will die and wither due to lack of use/stimulus/feedback' damage, which is still damage.
Another analogy, a better analogy:
You have become very accustomed to your normal eyesight. Imagine someone giving you very powerful glasses to wear for years (akin to his implants), and then Canadian airport security ripping them from your face, tearing the skin off your noise and brow.
Will you suffer brain damage? You will certainly suffer visual problems, and until your brain becomes accustomed to not wearing glasses (if possible) or if you regain your glasses, your brain, body, coordination, and vision will most certainly be affected.
They have a whole friggin open source OS (Darwin) which they have grafted their own closed source technology (displayPDF, QuickTime, CoreAudio, etc), and are selling for $130, or bundling with their Macs.
They also have an open source Darwin Streaming Server, and a complementary closed source QuickTime Streaming Server. They bundle Apache as their HTTP server, as well.
What can Microsoft do that would be similar?
How about release the DirectX library as open source? However, use their own in house optimization-compilation technology to ensure that their own DX libs are 10% or 15% faster than anything out there... IE, outinnovate the competition, themselves?
Or release their older Office programs as open source? Sell newer, more advanced copies, but allow the general public to self support and modify their older versions? Of course, again, the key is to out innovate yourself to convince people to buy the newest version instead of incrementally updating and fixing the older, free source version.
Or rather, release a Office Core, which allows you to compile a very basic Office devoid of nifty features... though this might backfire, as people don't generally use 80% of the features in Office, do they?
Sorry, I clicked on tech specs:
http://www.iomega.com/nas/nas_tech2.html
It mentioned 10bT/100bT, and nowhere 1000bT. It didn't occur to me to scan through every variation to see that the highest end model *did* have 1000bT when the lower end ones did not.
And doesn't GigE give you more connections at the same bandwidth, rather than significantly higher bandwidth with only one connection?
Hmm, Raid 5 in hardware, with speeds approaching, what, 40mbps? 60mbps? 80mbps?
Yet 100bT networking with a throughput of what, 10-12mbps? GigaE options would let them have 100-120mbps, at least...
It weighs 4.9lbs (much less than your 9 lb weight requirement), is a rubber mounted (drive and electronics), magnesium alloy framed (for lightness, rigidity, and strength), polycarbonate covered (bulletproof? Probably not.) laptop that you can probably use to stop knife wielding attackers and then write up the incident up in your online journal while wirelessly surfing the net at your local Starbucks.
:)
You think I'm joking, but I'm not. You could probably stop a knife with your iBook, whack the attacker in the head with it, and then walk away with a working iBook
To make it even more AI-like, if the driver has certain preferences, the AI-cruise control should be able to pick up on those preferences.
If the driver goes into certain curves at 30mph, and other curves at 15mph, the AI should be able to tell the difference between those curves, and in future sense modify it's behavior appropriately. IE, a trainable AI.
As long as the problem can be phrased such that the human can do a better job than a computer (such as cruise control), then it is an AI problem. Right now cruise control is merely computer assisted driving, but it is on no way a solved AI problem.
In a very bottom's up biological intelligence thing (animal reasoning), cruise control *can* be (I don't know if it *is) structured as an AI thing.
You have two analog controls, gas and brake. You have time; how long to break, how long to accelerate; you have intensity, or magnitude, how much gas and how much brake pressure, and then you have current velocity, current RPM, current gear, and even mass to take into account, not to mention road curvature, road quality, and road grade (steepness).
In this light, it's a very valid AI question. Can you create a system that maximizes fuel economy and ride quality (you want to avoid extreme acceleration and deceleration, right?).
I know for a fact that I can outperform my car's cruise control for both milage, performance, and ride quality. As long as I can perform better than my car, then the car isn't being intelligent enough, and is therefore an AI quality problem.
To be more precise:
If you're on a down grade and you're below the threshold speed, you can let the car coast and naturally accelerate. If you're above the threshold speed, you need to actually slow below the threshold speed to take into account the fact that there is acceleration as a factor. Or instead of braking, the car can shift into a lower gear, alternating with braking, to insure brakes don't overheat.
Then there's curvature. The car should actually decelerate going into a curve; it should do so more aggressively the tighter the curve, but as the driver starts straightening it should accelerate again. How much should it slow down? How much should it accelerate? It's not linear, but depends strongly on how banked the road is and what the road conditions are. Wet vs dry, or even icy, for example.
Or going uphill. The car should accelerate to counter the speed drop, but should probably try to stay in the best gear, even if it means falling below the threshold for a while, because of fuel economy and power output. So it should accelerate somewhat, but be able to decide that staying in 5th at 70mph isn't nearly as good as dropping to 4th and going 63mph if the grade is steep enough. It should probably also be able to check engine temperature to guage when to keep going 70mph, and when to switch to a lower gear and drop to 63mph (loong shallow grade vs small, if steeper, hill, for example)
See, right now cruise control is really only best for straight sections of clear road because not enough AI has been applied, and not enough AI is available, to deal with curvy windy uphill and downhill roads, which is actually a better place for AI to be used, allowing the driver to concentrate on where the car is going (not over the cliff, I hope)!
The iBook is covered in polycarbonate plastic. The same stuff they use in ultra hard shatter resistent eyeglasses and in bulletproof glass.
Unless you're carrying steel surgical instruments and diamond cutting blades in the bottom of your briefcase or in your backpack, the iBook will probably suffer, at most, cosmetic scratches from the run of the mill stuff.
Alloys will deform *and stay that way* where the polycarbonate will flex and return it's shape. The iBook itself has a polycarbonate shell, a magnesium frame (you wanted alloys? you got it), rubber mounting for the drives and other components, and it's got an extra sturdy hinge for the screen.
The only stronger laptop I can imagine would be the Panasonic ToughBooks. Everything else I've seen (even my Titanium PowerBook) pales in comparison to an iBook.
Somehow I have a hard time believing homepage.mac.com can be slashdotted... but we'll see, won't we?
It's actually called a tariff. That $600 tariff means that he doesn't have associate with the likes of you, who wouldn't or couldn't actually pay the $600 tariff. It's sort of like protection money; he gives Apple $600, and Apple makes sure you never bother him since you won't be using the same computing or hardware platform.
I suspect Apple is now making $200 per iPod.
:)
The Firefly from SmartDisk uses the same 5gb disk mechanism as the iPod and sells for $200 vs the iPod's $400
6 months ago, the Firefly was $400 and the iPod is $400. Apple must now be picking up the difference
Come on now, be fair.
:)
640x480 is almost a third of the pixels of 1024x768! You're moving a third less data to the screen; actually, considering that there's double buffering and compositing and blending, more like over half as much data, or more, on the KDE machine. Bump it up to 1024x768 first
Dork.
I was trying to make a point.
That an OS X would require Apple hardware regardless of the processor, and that the processor would therefore matter little in the choice of buying a Mac (or not), barring performance differences between 2x1GHz and 2.2GHz
Apple evidently thinks the market of people *almost* convinced is much, much, easier and much, much, bigger than you do.
Makes sense. It's always easier to convince someone who wants to be convinced than to sell to someone who isn't even looking.
As long as Apple targets both; the ones who consider but turn away, and the ones who would never consider, they cover all their bases.
I myself am the only Mac user out of a group of 14 or so people, but 2 of them had considered, and one of them outright rejected. 2 more had not even considered, and had bought Dells. So of the 5, Apple would have the easiest time grabbing the two that had considered- in doing so, they are laying the groundwork for the 2 that hadn't, because the fears, objections, or misconceptions that they may have had would have been dealt with by the first pair already.
They do ship OS X for PCs; it just requires a G4 or G3 PC produced by Apple, for all it's worth.
If they shipped OS X for x86, I don't think it would change the requirement of a AMD or Intel x86 PC produced by Apple.
Read Larry Niven much?
Anyway, we do have a source of unlimited free energy: the sun.
It's harnessing it that's the problem, of course.
We can't ultimately pour more energy into our world than the sun already does. The whole point of greenhouse gasses is that we can modify the distribution of the atmosphere so that certain.. side effects occur; like global warming/cooling, as an example.
We really can't destroy the earth, at this point, but we can certainly destroy our home, which to a very large degree *is* synonmyous with the earth.
Thermodynamics, natch.
Here's my understanding of the process.
Let's say you have a 100% efficient generator.
10W of heat is generated to convert water to steam. Said steam runs a turbine to produce 10W of electrical energy. Assuming no loss in transfer, that 10W get sent to you to power lights, your PC, your heater, etc. Eventually, in the act of being used, all 10W of electrical power gets transformed into heat.
I didn't say all heat based power stations must be 50% efficient, and I'm not sure that's what the original poster was implying. Just that all 10W generated must be flushed into the environment at the end of the day. The only reason this isn't a zero sum game is that the sun pumps so much more excess energy into our world than we can spend that, assuming high enough efficiency, we can operate until the sun dies.
Hey, that's what research is for. Find alternative materials that have lower activation energies, other frequencies, combinations of frequencies, etc.
The point being that it's an option to at least destroy/remove radiactive wastes in a much shorter period than 100M years, right?
It's physics. Everything gets converted to heat, eventually. Any energy transfer.
Also, it's a note on how power plants work. Most of them operate off steam generators. Moving steam moves turbines produces electricity.
How do you generate steam? Heat. To produce 10W of electrical energy, *at* least 10W of heat must be produced to move the steam, assuming 100% efficiency. 50% efficiency means 20W of heat.
Imagine fission at the turn of a switch!
Also, radioactive waste may not be a problem. Laser induced fission.
Essentially it means that radioactive waste can be recycled. Bombarding it with laser induced neutrons can force it to fizz until it is no longer radioactive, while hopefully still generating more energy than the laser costs to run. A second benefit is that nuclear plants no longer need to maintain critical mass. Turn on the laser, and watch the nuclear reaction go, turn off the laser, and see it stop!
Radioactive waste may not be a problem, actually. Laser induced fission.
Essentially it means that radioactive waste can be recycled. Bombarding it with laser induced neutrons can force it to fizz until it is no longer radioactive, while hopefully still generating more energy than the laser costs to run. A second benefit is that nuclear plants no longer need to maintain critical mass. Turn on the laser, and watch the nuclear reaction go, turn off the laser, and see it stop!
Actually, root permissions should, theoretically, stop you.
If it's going to modify your system, it will ask you for your password; if it resides entirely in userspace, it won't.
So you won't get 'services' and such, but you can get junk you didn't ask for. However, this junk can easily be prevented, again, with the Unix permissions model that OS X uses.
Maybe so :)
:)
When my CPU is at 100% for long periods (like compiling Mozilla in the background or rendering iMovie projects), the fan kicks in and is fairly noisy.
But in day to day useage, the fan never kicks in. The keyboard, the mouse click, and the occasional drive seek make the most noise, in that order, followed by the fan.
Anyway, I hope you like OS X. It's such a pretty system, and clean, and cool
Most of the noise is the disk drive, at least in my PowerBook (400MHz).
Similarly for the iBook (now up to 600MHz), and there's a variable speed fan in the iMac (800MHz, but I suspect the lower 700MHz will run cooler).
Macs have been known for a while as quiet computers.
You can't be serious?
:)
No one is talking about 'a few extra trees'
When they say NJ has no water table, that means there's no money left in the bank... The area is living hand to mouth here.
Water in the ground is like money in the bank. If there's any sort of disruption (manmade, natural, catastrophe, or otherwise), THERE IS NO WATER.
So... you in NJ with decent roads, better and bigger facilities and housing, but absolutely no water. What would you do? Nothing to drink with, nothing to bathe with, nothing to clean with...
Or rather, there *would* be water, but you may not be able to afford to use it, if it's priced like milk or gas