As far as I know, the idea originated there in the 19th century, but they are still talking about it. The only country I found that implemented this is Sweden.
Everyone else in the world but the US seems to have them, and they appear to work damned well, too.
Actually, could you tell me what country uses school vouchers? I know for sure that Switzerland does not. And I don't think either Germany, France or Japan use it either.
Not so long ago, I would have dismissed the whole 'laptop appearance matters', but since I started using my Powerbook in public places, I had women I know saying they found it beautiful. This was certainly not the reason I had bought the laptop for in the first place, but it was the first time for me that I had a sincere positive reaction from that don't care so much about computers.
I suspect this is non negligible factor for laptops, because they are public objects, you typically use them in public or semi-public places and in such circumstances, appearances matters.
Another domain where Apple got appearance right is "Keynote", Apple's Powerpoint replacement. The program is nice and simple, with nice graphical features for smoothing, transparency and vector graphics (the ability to insert Latex equations Yay! ), but most of all, the default templates are really beautiful. When doing Powerpoint presentation, most people use the default templates, and they look very childish, with primary colors and well, everybody uses the same...
This is IMHO the reason Apple has first released a presentation software, then a page layout software, but not yet a spreadsheet, because a good look is not an important asset in a spreadsheet. The funny part is, with iWork 06, both Pages and Keynote include some very simple spreadsheet functionality, we might end up with a spreadsheet implemented not as an application, but as an shared library used by other programs.
I did not find the article very informative, but well... It actually boils down to something like "there were a lot of technical glitches and the game line-up for the 360 was not very good, many games are sequels and some star games (Halo and Dead or Alive) are missing but the 360 is much better because the technology of the console is more advanced and you can download trailers..."
The problem when you do a sequel is that you are trying to please the people who liked the original version. Because of this, your target demographic gets older (all the existing customers have gotten older, and you need really a lot of young customers to offset this), this means usually people with more money, but more conservative tastes.
In this sense, a given system is linked to a certain "generation", that largely stays with a system they know. I suspect that the really new games will come out on consoles for younger people, either cheaper or more portable systems.
I installed it nothing seems to have been broken on my powerbook.
One interesting thing I noticed is in the Finder's preview pane for applications. It basically lists the architectures the application is built for, the information does not appear in the 'get information' window. At this point in time, only the developers tool include the intel binaries. Maybe it was there before, but I did not notice it.
I suspect this behaviour is typical of people who dismantle things to see how they work, but not of the general population. I know quite a few people who have iPods, but only bought music at the Apple store after many months of using their iPod, if ever. In general, the pattern I saw, is that people waited for one perso to try the iTunes store, only afterwards buy some music. I also think that the iPod nano cannot play video, so I doubt people who bought them would be specially interested in buying videos.
Statistics can only help if you really have large corpuses of reference material, and feeding the text in two langage into the system will probably not be sufficient, you will need to map what expression goes to which. Gramatical analysis can only help to you a point. If you take this french sentence "Il va voler la vedette." It can mean either ''he will steal the show'' or ''he will steal the speedboat''. Statistics won't help you much: because one translation is more probable that the other doesn't make it right. The only way to select the correct translation is to detect in the context that the text is about show-buisness or ships.
As for commercial software, I'm not so convinced. I work in Japan, and we bought som translation software to translate to/from japanese. The quality is somehow better that what you can get on the web, in the sense that it seems to detect some key expressions and translate them, but we are far from getting even readable english from a Japanese corporate web-page. This is not very surprising: Japanese and English have very different structures, so translating is really not obvious. I suspect statistics will help in translating common things like manuals and commercial letters as they are basically always saying the same thing.
Finally, I must disagree about your comment about latin. The difficulty for X in speaking langage Y has a lot to do with how different they are in the logical structure, the vocabulary (and the sounds they use), so for people who speak romance languages, learning Latin will certainly be easier that say for a Chinese, people who speak langages with cases might also have an advantage.
Then how come every Japanese professor at my American university urged me NOT to go to Japanese universities for grad school?
Because doing grad school in Japan is hard, and depending were you are in the US you are probably better off.
You site anectdotal evidence, but I really doubt that is the trend.
Err, for Japan, it is not anectdotal information, but official numbers.
A strong Euro would also tend to keep them at home since if they go overseas and earn money in dollars for a few years, it wouldn't translate into Euros as well.
Assuming they were hoping on saving money during their studies.
At the graduate level you see a large increase in the number of European students at most major universities in the US.
Actually, I tried to find some numbers about this on the web, but could not find any. Do you have any source?
The trick is that nobody programs in Altivec assembly. Altivec programming was done using intrinsic C functions that would map directly on the right Altivec instruction. Usually the c-functions had the same name as the opcodes. There is a special keyword "vector" to identify vector data.
If intel's compiler supports in some way those intrinsic functions (A large part might be doable as macros) and maps them to the relevant SSE instructions then Altivec optimized programs would a) still compile b) use the already vectorized code to generate vector assembly. I is beyond me how easily you can map one vector instruction set on the other. There certainly won't be a 1 to 1 mapping.
The US benefitted from an immigrant brain source once (Einstein, Von Braun, Tesla) - it could easily flow the other way if conditions here become too hostile or the grass looks greener elsewhere.
You can stop using the conditional tense. Chinese students now prefer to go to Japan instead of the US http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/china/03112801.html, and from anecdotal evidence I suspect this is also the case for European students (normally, with the dollar so low, European should flock to the US).
One of main problems is getting a visa to enter the US, even for a conference. It is not only about high profile cases http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/17/business/cr ypto.php, but simply PhD students. What do you do when the time to get a visa for entering the US is longer than the time between acceptance and the actual conference?
Also would you go to the US if you were either arab, muslim, or have some family connection in an arab country?
Despite the amount of hype surrounding dual-core, unless you massively change software (likely to happen eventually) to support SMP, things go slower on dual-cores than single core processors, if the dual-cores are clocked lower (Intel's current chips).
I agree that this is common wisdom, but this could also be why Apple would be a nice customer. Apple's desktop have been SMP for years now, and a lot of software has been engineered to take advantage of it. Most of the high level libraries built in OS X like vecLib or Quartz are highly parallelizable. It also seems Roseta, the PPC emulator would run nicely on dual cores.
While I agree Apple's processor choices have not been the best, they are also tend to try to use all the features of the hardware they are running on (altivec, GPU) - certainly in part because of the fact that they don't have the best processor around. This might be why Intel is so keen for Apple, instead of having to beg Microsoft to use their new features, they now have another OS builder with a stronger incentive to use them.
If you put your tinfoil hat on - heck if we start purely speculative articles - you might argue that one of the goal of intel might also be to stop the trend of running things on the GPU (well as long as they are not intel GPUs). If the whole "let's run the windowing system on the GPU" idea would have reached the mainstream sooner or later, Apple probably did push things forward.
While I agree that one of Itanium's problems was that compilers were not good enough, there was also the whole issue of nobody actually really using the thing and optimizing for it. The server market it was aimed at was not a very good choice, the server market is very conservative and this is not a context where optimizing a few critical libraries makes a difference. The reason Apple could pull out the 68K emulation is that the CPU spent 70% of the time in the GUI libraries.
digital clock on laptops. I'd love to have an external LCD display showing the time, even when the machine's not on. hell, that'd even be useful on a desktop machine.
Basically, for laptops, this amounts to have a second small external LCD like some mobile phones have. I'm not sure that I need such a thing on my laptop, as I already have it in my mobile phone.
For desktops, what I really would like is a small single LCD screen on the keyboard. This could display the time when the computer is turned off, or enable the keypad to be used as a calculator (some external USB keypads do that). When turned on, it would be convenient to be able to run a shell and attach it to this display.
I'm not sure, basically the role of the firmware on currents macs is to figure out the general settings of the machine, find a kernel on some device and start it. So long that your hardware is not used in this phase, the drivers don't need to know about the firmware. So this is mainly an issue for network cards (for network booting) and I/O cards like USB, Firewire, or ATA (again only for booting purposes) that cannot be handled using the generic drivers. Ok maybe also display adaptors that can't go to a default mode.
The first mac-tels will probably be laptops. So the lack of drivers will mostly be an issue for the case of booting using a hard drive attached to a Cardbus adapter that cannot be handled via generic drivers. While this is an issue, but I think it is clearly not a show-stopper.
Also, wasn't there an Apple spreadsheet program previously...called 'grid' or something?
Maybe the program you are taling about is Claris Resolve? I used it a little bit a long time ago. As often the interface was less cluttered and more natural than Excel. I also used XTND technology, yet another nice thing that disappeared.
Console: Current Wintel PC technology with Apple's sense of style.
Aren't the processors of this thing supposed to be PPC based? This would disqualify it as wintel technology no? You might as well call it a Mac mini on steroids.
All the examples shown in linked article are US style cities, with straight roads and relatively simple roughly cubical buildings. I wonder how this technique fare with more complex buildings and street arrangement, as you find in the center of many European cities.
You realise that before post-it notes, people would simply use a sheet of paper and some duct tape or a bloody paper-clip? (the non virtual, non annoying kind). The brilliant idea of post-it notes was to have pre-cut, pre-glued paper notes. Claiming that post-it notes are ancestors of hyper-links is like saying that the red pen used by teachers is the ancestor of versioning systems...
I wonder how long it will take for spam that proposes to move virtual gold out of disabled accounts
Dear Friend,
I request your assistance for an affair of the highest importance. I am Lalal 40th level gnome, whose account has been partially disabled. By hard work, I have amassed the total amount of 1'000'000 gold (one million golds) that is now blocked with said character. I solicit your help to move this sum to a new account. Due to changes of policies at Blizzard, it is of uttermost importance that this affair is conducted with the highest discretion. In reward for cooperation, I am ready to give you 10% of the total sum, that is 100'000 golds (hundred thousand golds).
In order for the transaction to take place, I need your account name and password. Be assured that I will proceed with uttermost discretion./blokquote)
Two years ago, the US have imposed that all foreign passport have to be machine readable for people from countries in the Visa Waiver program. In Switzerland, this forced a lot of people to get new passports, which caused a huge backlog. Now that most people me including have new passports which are machine readable, they want passeport with biometric information, so expect biometric information on US ID card within six years.
Going to conferences in the US is really getting needlessly complicated, but at least the US are protected from those nasty Swiss terrorists...
Actually, on OS X, if the software uses core-graphics or core-video to do special effects, it can benefit from a powerful graphic card. Now the question is if somebody will write photoshop plugins that link against core graphics...
Somewhere, someone is thinking of a killer application that needs 512MB of video RAM to work.
I just can't, for the life of it, imagine what it could be...
The GUI system of OS X is relying more and more on the GPU to do drawing operations. The approach that Apple seems to take is to store everything graphics related in the GPU's memory, this includes window contents (for compositing), but also bitmaps, font glyphs etc.
This approach gives improved performance, but eats up a lot of graphical memory, so such a system would probably benefit from 512 MB of video RAM. Whenever this is a good justification for having such a video-card is of course a question of point of view. I remember when I upgraded the video-memory of my machine to 1 MB, at that time, it seemed huge...
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, the idea originated there in the 19th century, but they are still talking about it. The only country I found that implemented this is Sweden.
I suspect this is non negligible factor for laptops, because they are public objects, you typically use them in public or semi-public places and in such circumstances, appearances matters.
Another domain where Apple got appearance right is "Keynote", Apple's Powerpoint replacement. The program is nice and simple, with nice graphical features for smoothing, transparency and vector graphics (the ability to insert Latex equations Yay! ), but most of all, the default templates are really beautiful. When doing Powerpoint presentation, most people use the default templates, and they look very childish, with primary colors and well, everybody uses the same...
This is IMHO the reason Apple has first released a presentation software, then a page layout software, but not yet a spreadsheet, because a good look is not an important asset in a spreadsheet. The funny part is, with iWork 06, both Pages and Keynote include some very simple spreadsheet functionality, we might end up with a spreadsheet implemented not as an application, but as an shared library used by other programs.
The problem when you do a sequel is that you are trying to please the people who liked the original version. Because of this, your target demographic gets older (all the existing customers have gotten older, and you need really a lot of young customers to offset this), this means usually people with more money, but more conservative tastes.
In this sense, a given system is linked to a certain "generation", that largely stays with a system they know. I suspect that the really new games will come out on consoles for younger people, either cheaper or more portable systems.
Widgets are not run by Safari. They are separate Unix processes. They just happen to share a library that handles HTML.
One interesting thing I noticed is in the Finder's preview pane for applications. It basically lists the architectures the application is built for, the information does not appear in the 'get information' window. At this point in time, only the developers tool include the intel binaries. Maybe it was there before, but I did not notice it.
I suspect this behaviour is typical of people who dismantle things to see how they work, but not of the general population. I know quite a few people who have iPods, but only bought music at the Apple store after many months of using their iPod, if ever. In general, the pattern I saw, is that people waited for one perso to try the iTunes store, only afterwards buy some music. I also think that the iPod nano cannot play video, so I doubt people who bought them would be specially interested in buying videos.
As for commercial software, I'm not so convinced. I work in Japan, and we bought som translation software to translate to/from japanese. The quality is somehow better that what you can get on the web, in the sense that it seems to detect some key expressions and translate them, but we are far from getting even readable english from a Japanese corporate web-page. This is not very surprising: Japanese and English have very different structures, so translating is really not obvious. I suspect statistics will help in translating common things like manuals and commercial letters as they are basically always saying the same thing.
Finally, I must disagree about your comment about latin. The difficulty for X in speaking langage Y has a lot to do with how different they are in the logical structure, the vocabulary (and the sounds they use), so for people who speak romance languages, learning Latin will certainly be easier that say for a Chinese, people who speak langages with cases might also have an advantage.
This is actually the way addresses are written in Japan. As far as post sorting goes, it is much simpler, more important things first.
If intel's compiler supports in some way those intrinsic functions (A large part might be doable as macros) and maps them to the relevant SSE instructions then Altivec optimized programs would a) still compile b) use the already vectorized code to generate vector assembly. I is beyond me how easily you can map one vector instruction set on the other. There certainly won't be a 1 to 1 mapping.
One of main problems is getting a visa to enter the US, even for a conference. It is not only about high profile cases http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/17/business/cr ypto.php, but simply PhD students. What do you do when the time to get a visa for entering the US is longer than the time between acceptance and the actual conference?
Also would you go to the US if you were either arab, muslim, or have some family connection in an arab country?
While I agree Apple's processor choices have not been the best, they are also tend to try to use all the features of the hardware they are running on (altivec, GPU) - certainly in part because of the fact that they don't have the best processor around. This might be why Intel is so keen for Apple, instead of having to beg Microsoft to use their new features, they now have another OS builder with a stronger incentive to use them.
If you put your tinfoil hat on - heck if we start purely speculative articles - you might argue that one of the goal of intel might also be to stop the trend of running things on the GPU (well as long as they are not intel GPUs). If the whole "let's run the windowing system on the GPU" idea would have reached the mainstream sooner or later, Apple probably did push things forward.
While I agree that one of Itanium's problems was that compilers were not good enough, there was also the whole issue of nobody actually really using the thing and optimizing for it. The server market it was aimed at was not a very good choice, the server market is very conservative and this is not a context where optimizing a few critical libraries makes a difference. The reason Apple could pull out the 68K emulation is that the CPU spent 70% of the time in the GUI libraries.
Actually, it will be like an old mac, as the newer ones will be using intel processors. Things are really going in loops.
The first mac-tels will probably be laptops. So the lack of drivers will mostly be an issue for the case of booting using a hard drive attached to a Cardbus adapter that cannot be handled via generic drivers. While this is an issue, but I think it is clearly not a show-stopper.
I thought the correct acronym was XTLA, eXtended Three Letter Acronym. Either is four letter, or three letters extended :-)
I would really be impressed if they could automatically generate a 3D model of the three dimensional mess that is Lausanne:
You realise that before post-it notes, people would simply use a sheet of paper and some duct tape or a bloody paper-clip? (the non virtual, non annoying kind). The brilliant idea of post-it notes was to have pre-cut, pre-glued paper notes. Claiming that post-it notes are ancestors of hyper-links is like saying that the red pen used by teachers is the ancestor of versioning systems...
Two years ago, the US have imposed that all foreign passport have to be machine readable for people from countries in the Visa Waiver program. In Switzerland, this forced a lot of people to get new passports, which caused a huge backlog. Now that most people me including have new passports which are machine readable, they want passeport with biometric information, so expect biometric information on US ID card within six years.
Going to conferences in the US is really getting needlessly complicated, but at least the US are protected from those nasty Swiss terrorists...
Actually, on OS X, if the software uses core-graphics or core-video to do special effects, it can benefit from a powerful graphic card. Now the question is if somebody will write photoshop plugins that link against core graphics...
This approach gives improved performance, but eats up a lot of graphical memory, so such a system would probably benefit from 512 MB of video RAM. Whenever this is a good justification for having such a video-card is of course a question of point of view. I remember when I upgraded the video-memory of my machine to 1 MB, at that time, it seemed huge...