Generally it just makes your system unstable and prone to crashing and making murphey's law become a reality on your precious data.
Uh, no. When the system starts becoming unstable, you know you've reached the limit. The point of overclocking is to push the chip as far as it is able to without becoming unstable.
The reason it's so popular is that many chips are capable of being pushed very far without any added instability. To the crowd that builds their own machines anyway, it's just another thing to try.
There will be no further naturally occurring evolution of the human race.
This is presuming that science and medicine and culture are somehow "unnatural", or at least "less natural" than anything other animals do.
So in essence, science has outsmarted evolution. Survival of the fittest doesn't apply when everyone survives.
Science has superceded biological evolution, but it's still an evolutionary process, just like everything else we do. Survival of the fittest now applies to our ideas (culture and technology) rather than our genes.
if the community keeps splitting up, Linux will never pose a real threat to Windows in the desktop world.
The trouble with this kind of assessment is that not everyone in "the community" cares if Linux poses a threat to Windows. They just want to build what they think is great software.
2) Low barriers to entry also means there is going to be hundreds of other "undergrads" trying to sell the same idea. This means your chances of eventual payback are much smaller!
Who cares if a company has the same idea as you? You just have to do it better. That's competition.
3) Why should bigger companies buy startups when they can just partner with them or outsource company services to them?
Because they can. Because they get control. Because it's potentially cheaper. Because they get quality people.
Yeah, starting a web based startup doesn't cost significantly more than just being a slacker. But if you haven't noticed, 99% of us can't afford to just set around and be a slacker either!
The point is that you don't need to raise millions of dollars. $10,000 is a trivial amount of money in the grand scheme of things -- it is not impossible to come by if you think your ideas and your people are worth it. If you don't think they're worth it, then why bother?
Apparently Mr. Graham thinks most students graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in the bank and can afford to not have any income for several years.
So, it seems that he thinks 1) they don't need to graduate first, 2) tens of thousands of dollars is plenty, and 3) three months is a good enough bootstrapping period.
It is obviously outright false that nerds are not popular in secondary school because they have better things to do than spend time trying to be popular.
Perhaps you should chalk this up to your own unique experience rather than assuming it is "obviously" false. I for one (and hordes of people on Slashdot would agree) that his essay sounds strikingly familiar. Grahams writing style seems to confound people that can't distinguish between a generalization (which isn't expected to apply universally), and an absolute statement.
However, people with those sort of smarts are extremely rare and so this trend does not hold out hope for the vast majority of CS students much less undergrads in general.
And that's precisely why Graham is suggesting that those few smart kids run out and start startups. Why get paid the same as the next guy if you're (potentially) ten times as productive as he is? Why not found a startup and have something that proves you're worth ten times as much to the company? Even if your company flops, it looks good on a resume.
Heck I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste my youth as a workaholic just to end up as one of those rich bachelors at 35.
It beats wasting your youth being a workaholic for someone else. Who says you have to waste your youth, anyway? After 16 years of schooling, 2 or 3 spent working for yourself sounds like a reasonable investment, given the potential payoff.
Also, it's a lot easier to go from working for yourself to working for a company than vice-versa. You're going to have a harder time justifing the risk of founding your own startup when you're 35, and presumably have a lot more responsibilities, than you are when you're 22 and it really doesn't matter if you fail.
It isn't all about accumulating the biggest bank account but also about knowing you can provide for a family, have free time and safely plan for the future.
The question is how much time do you want to spend working to provide for a family. 30 years, or 3? Even if you waste that 3 driving a company into the ground, you've got 27 left to play it safe. The time to take chances is when you're young -- before you start worrying about those things.
I wonder if he remembers he sold his company to Yahoo at the height of the Internet bubble. He was in a singular moment in time that's not likely to be repeated and so what happened to him is orders of magnitude less likely for anyone else doing the same sort of thing.
I disagree. The thing about the Bubble wasn't that more startups were getting bought out, it was that more were getting founded and over-funded, while the number of good ideas remained the same. The ones that survived were the ones that had good ideas and weren't over-inflated by VC money. Not surprisingly, Graham's writings about startups (including this one) stress the importance of having good ideas and avoiding VC money.
Hiring someone with no work experience is extremely risky.
Nothing in TFA contradicts this statement, or any of the others you made.
The point he's making is that founding a startup, even if it fails, is probably more attractive to a potential employer than years of work experience at some other company. It's staggeringly unlikely that you'll get bought out, but the fact that you even tried implies that you do have a clue.
What is this? this is ridiculous. My current up to date tiger Mac is only on darwin 8.0.0 and now they are giving away free 8.0.1? Wake up Apple some people are paying you to get products, not to pay for lagging behind.
You didn't pay for Darwin 8.0.0 -- you paid for all the stuff built on top of it. I sincerely doubt there's anything in this release that you're missing out on.
No, actually, it isn't. A trademark is entirely different. For example, a trademark prevents someone from putting your logo on their product, whether it looks like your product or not. A design patent prevents someone from copying the design of your product, no matter what logo they put on it.
It is a dangerous precedent for design elements to be patentable.
Except it isn't a precedent at all -- design patents aren't a recent thing. They were incorporated into patent law in 1842. It seems like they are among the least dangerous parts of current patent law.
Because Apple computers are toys that people like to accessorize with???
It's more like Apple is the only computer maker that has a significant investment in design, and thus the only one with a reason to protect that investment.
this is rather like apple's patent on the itunes interface. problematic by itself, and depressing if it becomes a precedent for future patent maneuvering.
A design patent is not quite the same as what one normally thinks of when talking about patents. Basically all this move indicates is that nobody can release a tablet that looks like what Apple would design. It's meant to prevent rip-offs, not stifle innovation. Of course, I fully expect someone to claim that rip-offs are innovative.
That's one of the most arrogant comments I've read on here in a long time. Arrogant, elitest, shallow, AND uninformed. Nice job.
Yes, but it's still right. PC hardware design is, with exceedingly rare exception, crap. The companies that supposedly have good design (Sony is the usual example) tend to roll out a lot of polished turds. They just don't bother to expend the effort, and it shows.
So lets see... they control the hardware, and release a product that doesn't quite work right?
It's more like they released a bunch of products, and only a few of them don't work right in certain circumstances. For the majority, Tiger is fine, but if something does break, it's usually just one thing in a package full of things that work right.
Also, 10.x.1 releases are to be expected soon after release, as 1) the final version was frozen a month or so prior to the actual release date (so it's been more like six weeks since 10.4.0 was done), and 2) the user base (and the variety of configurations in use) jumps massively -- for every given feature, there's at least one person (maybe thousands) out there using it in a way, or in a combination that the developer hadn't anticipated.
Clearly shown in the sample (and indeed demoed by Steve Jobs himself at various keynotes) are the keywords assigned to the photos in the iPhoto software. This has never been searchable on my system, even after a rebuild and repair of permissions by the install disc.
I haven't experienced this problem myself, but here are some things you might try, in Terminal:
mdimport -L will list all of your Spotlight importers -- there should be one for iPhoto, but if there's not, then that's your problem. I don't know why you wouldn't have it, though.
mdimport -r/System/Library/Spotlight/iPhoto.mdimporter will force Spotlight to reindex everything that that importer can index.
a light, ethereal scent with notes of jasmine and citrus, evoking memories of a mountain lake after a spring rainfall.
I don't want to remember my family being attacked by ethereal citrus at a mountain lake after a spring rainfall, you insensitive clod! I want to forget! I want to forget!
Am I missing something or is the PowerMac severely under spec'd and overpriced compared to the new iMac?
You're missing something. Namely this: Apple doesn't want to sell low-end PowerMacs.
I have no idea how much they make off of each system, but I think it's probable they make more selling a high-end iMac than a low-end PowerMac. They undoubtedly cost less to make overall. I imagine even the shipping costs make a difference. The PowerMac weighs almost 20 pounds more than the iMac. Multiply by thousands of units, and you get a big number.
There's also the feature differences between the two lines that might be important to some customers. Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, dual-monitor support, PCI slots, etc. Some PowerMac customers may need these things more than raw performance.
The number of people viewing avi's and wmv's are much larger than the number of people who are ready to view qt's.
True, of course. I guess I blocked WMV from my mind because it isn't suitable for my own stuff. As for Real vs. QuickTime, I recall seeing numbers that put them very, very, close -- and as a creator, I would choose QT over Real any day -- I don't think I'm alone in that. In any event, the point was that QT7/H.264 is news because it's gone mainstream.
Also I am beginning to doubt my own understanding of MPEG-4.
It doesn't help that MPEG-4 is utterly bewildering.
So is quicktime7 a new format or not?... Quicktime7 is the same old qt format, but the program now has a better MPEG-4 stream handling plus an AVC handler?
My understanding is that it is the same.mov container as before. What has changed is QuickTime-the-software, which has been significantly upgraded. In other words, the file format was capable of things the software was not.
But then in that case if they had released these trailers before qt7, the only people who would not be able to play them are the people with Quicktime players, while people with mplayer will have had no problems.
Not quite. It's more confusing than that. Players don't always support every format in every container that they support. mplayer might support.mov, and it might support H.264, but it might not support H.264 inside.mov (this example might not be true, but such things do happen). The standard specifies only two container formats:.mp4 (based on QT), and.mpg (MPEG-2/DVD style muxed streams), so it's entirely possible that there's some limitation or difference in mplayer, et al.'s.MOV support that makes it not work. Likewise, Apple may use some part or "profile" of AVC that isn't supported by mplayer yet.
So, my conclusion there is "Maybe. MPEG-4 is confusing. My head hurts."
I've read elsewhere of people using H.264 video + MP3 audio inside AVI containers, which is so incredibly non-standard that it makes me dizzy.
For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.
QuickTime is a container format, that can, er contain many different codecs. In this case, the codec in question is H.264, which is currently only available in QuickTime 7. Same format, new codec.
Lastly I would like to ask the Mac experts about H.264. It seems that this codec is nothing new, and ffmpeg has supported it for a couple of years now.
ffmpeg might have had H.264 decoding support for a while, but definitely not " a few years", and encoding is till pretty fresh. As in : BIG FAT WARNING: x264 is still in early development stage. (Also, many of the other existing H.264 implementations don't follow the spec, and do stupid things like use AVI containers.)
Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not?
A little of both, with a dose of marketing. QuickTime was showing it's age -- QuickTime 6's MPEG-4 implementation was a joke, mostly because of assumptions made with QuickTime 1 that no longer hold true.
The marketing comes in when you consider that the installed base of QuickTime users is more likely to upgrade if you go on about HD and pristine quality and fast downloads than APIs and architectures. It's a lot easier to get people to upgrade when you have a carrot to dangle in front of them.
Why H.264 is such big news?
The news is that it is now supported natively by a popular content creation platform, with an installed content delivery platform that is (IIRC), second only to Flash. This means that you can create H.264 content and have the reasonable expectation that people will be able to view it.
You can use patches from it your apps with a single function call, make screen savers with it or run the compositions stand alone in Quicktime.
In theory, you could embed a composition in a web page, as part of a QuickTime movie. I don't now for sure, as I don't have QT Pro on this machine, but I'm eager to try it.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally it just makes your system unstable and prone to crashing and making murphey's law become a reality on your precious data.
Uh, no. When the system starts becoming unstable, you know you've reached the limit. The point of overclocking is to push the chip as far as it is able to without becoming unstable.
The reason it's so popular is that many chips are capable of being pushed very far without any added instability. To the crowd that builds their own machines anyway, it's just another thing to try.
For a little bit more, I'd rather get [an ASUS MyPal] and put in [a 6GB microdrive].
I just priced that out, and I have to say, $800 is not "a little bit more" than $500.
There will be no further naturally occurring evolution of the human race.
This is presuming that science and medicine and culture are somehow "unnatural", or at least "less natural" than anything other animals do.
So in essence, science has outsmarted evolution. Survival of the fittest doesn't apply when everyone survives.
Science has superceded biological evolution, but it's still an evolutionary process, just like everything else we do. Survival of the fittest now applies to our ideas (culture and technology) rather than our genes.
if the community keeps splitting up, Linux will never pose a real threat to Windows in the desktop world.
The trouble with this kind of assessment is that not everyone in "the community" cares if Linux poses a threat to Windows. They just want to build what they think is great software.
2) Low barriers to entry also means there is going to be hundreds of other "undergrads" trying to sell the same idea. This means your chances of eventual payback are much smaller!
Who cares if a company has the same idea as you? You just have to do it better. That's competition.
3) Why should bigger companies buy startups when they can just partner with them or outsource company services to them?
Because they can. Because they get control. Because it's potentially cheaper. Because they get quality people.
Yeah, starting a web based startup doesn't cost significantly more than just being a slacker. But if you haven't noticed, 99% of us can't afford to just set around and be a slacker either!
The point is that you don't need to raise millions of dollars. $10,000 is a trivial amount of money in the grand scheme of things -- it is not impossible to come by if you think your ideas and your people are worth it. If you don't think they're worth it, then why bother?
Apparently Mr. Graham thinks most students graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in the bank and can afford to not have any income for several years.
Actually, he did recently help start a venture firm that funds undergraduate startups.
So, it seems that he thinks 1) they don't need to graduate first, 2) tens of thousands of dollars is plenty, and 3) three months is a good enough bootstrapping period.
It is obviously outright false that nerds are not popular in secondary school because they have better things to do than spend time trying to be popular.
Perhaps you should chalk this up to your own unique experience rather than assuming it is "obviously" false. I for one (and hordes of people on Slashdot would agree) that his essay sounds strikingly familiar. Grahams writing style seems to confound people that can't distinguish between a generalization (which isn't expected to apply universally), and an absolute statement.
However, people with those sort of smarts are extremely rare and so this trend does not hold out hope for the vast majority of CS students much less undergrads in general.
And that's precisely why Graham is suggesting that those few smart kids run out and start startups. Why get paid the same as the next guy if you're (potentially) ten times as productive as he is? Why not found a startup and have something that proves you're worth ten times as much to the company? Even if your company flops, it looks good on a resume.
Heck I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste my youth as a workaholic just to end up as one of those rich bachelors at 35.
It beats wasting your youth being a workaholic for someone else. Who says you have to waste your youth, anyway? After 16 years of schooling, 2 or 3 spent working for yourself sounds like a reasonable investment, given the potential payoff.
Also, it's a lot easier to go from working for yourself to working for a company than vice-versa. You're going to have a harder time justifing the risk of founding your own startup when you're 35, and presumably have a lot more responsibilities, than you are when you're 22 and it really doesn't matter if you fail.
It isn't all about accumulating the biggest bank account but also about knowing you can provide for a family, have free time and safely plan for the future.
The question is how much time do you want to spend working to provide for a family. 30 years, or 3? Even if you waste that 3 driving a company into the ground, you've got 27 left to play it safe. The time to take chances is when you're young -- before you start worrying about those things.
I wonder if he remembers he sold his company to Yahoo at the height of the Internet bubble. He was in a singular moment in time that's not likely to be repeated and so what happened to him is orders of magnitude less likely for anyone else doing the same sort of thing.
I disagree. The thing about the Bubble wasn't that more startups were getting bought out, it was that more were getting founded and over-funded, while the number of good ideas remained the same. The ones that survived were the ones that had good ideas and weren't over-inflated by VC money. Not surprisingly, Graham's writings about startups (including this one) stress the importance of having good ideas and avoiding VC money.
And besides, it's not like companies like Yahoo! aren't still acquiring startups.. Google, too.
You've got to love the "work" or else, you'd be better off working for the man.
I think the people Paul is trying to reach are the ones that would rather jump off of a bridge than work for the man.
So, I hear you're starting your own business? ...
All of that, and it still sounds better than working for someone else for the rest of my life.
What? But he gives so much interesting information and facts about areas that he has no expertise, experience or relation to.
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but if this kind of thing offends you, then Slashdot will probably make your head explode. Get out while you can.
Hiring someone with no work experience is extremely risky.
Nothing in TFA contradicts this statement, or any of the others you made.
The point he's making is that founding a startup, even if it fails, is probably more attractive to a potential employer than years of work experience at some other company. It's staggeringly unlikely that you'll get bought out, but the fact that you even tried implies that you do have a clue.
I had a roommate in 96/97 that refused to buy CD's because something better might come out.
Something better did come out in in 1998. It was called Napster.
What is this? this is ridiculous. My current up to date tiger Mac is only on darwin 8.0.0 and now they are giving away free 8.0.1? Wake up Apple some people are paying you to get products, not to pay for lagging behind.
You didn't pay for Darwin 8.0.0 -- you paid for all the stuff built on top of it. I sincerely doubt there's anything in this release that you're missing out on.
I recommend calming the fuck down.
That is why we have trademarks.
No, actually, it isn't. A trademark is entirely different. For example, a trademark prevents someone from putting your logo on their product, whether it looks like your product or not. A design patent prevents someone from copying the design of your product, no matter what logo they put on it.
It is a dangerous precedent for design elements to be patentable.
Except it isn't a precedent at all -- design patents aren't a recent thing. They were incorporated into patent law in 1842. It seems like they are among the least dangerous parts of current patent law.
Because Apple computers are toys that people like to accessorize with???
It's more like Apple is the only computer maker that has a significant investment in design, and thus the only one with a reason to protect that investment.
this is rather like apple's patent on the itunes interface. problematic by itself, and depressing if it becomes a precedent for future patent maneuvering.
A design patent is not quite the same as what one normally thinks of when talking about patents. Basically all this move indicates is that nobody can release a tablet that looks like what Apple would design. It's meant to prevent rip-offs, not stifle innovation. Of course, I fully expect someone to claim that rip-offs are innovative.
That's one of the most arrogant comments I've read on here in a long time. Arrogant, elitest, shallow, AND uninformed. Nice job.
Yes, but it's still right. PC hardware design is, with exceedingly rare exception, crap. The companies that supposedly have good design (Sony is the usual example) tend to roll out a lot of polished turds. They just don't bother to expend the effort, and it shows.
Congratulations, Charter Schools USA : I now think you're a stupid, evil, company without having any idea what you do.
Update: Now that I know what you do (and more importantly, how you do it), I hate you even more.
But hey, all publicity is good publicity!
So lets see... they control the hardware, and release a product that doesn't quite work right?
It's more like they released a bunch of products, and only a few of them don't work right in certain circumstances. For the majority, Tiger is fine, but if something does break, it's usually just one thing in a package full of things that work right.
Also, 10.x.1 releases are to be expected soon after release, as 1) the final version was frozen a month or so prior to the actual release date (so it's been more like six weeks since 10.4.0 was done), and 2) the user base (and the variety of configurations in use) jumps massively -- for every given feature, there's at least one person (maybe thousands) out there using it in a way, or in a combination that the developer hadn't anticipated.
Clearly shown in the sample (and indeed demoed by Steve Jobs himself at various keynotes) are the keywords assigned to the photos in the iPhoto software. This has never been searchable on my system, even after a rebuild and repair of permissions by the install disc.
/System/Library/Spotlight/iPhoto.mdimporter will force Spotlight to reindex everything that that importer can index.
I haven't experienced this problem myself, but here are some things you might try, in Terminal:
mdimport -L will list all of your Spotlight importers -- there should be one for iPhoto, but if there's not, then that's your problem. I don't know why you wouldn't have it, though.
mdimport -r
a light, ethereal scent with notes of jasmine and citrus, evoking memories of a mountain lake after a spring rainfall.
I don't want to remember my family being attacked by ethereal citrus at a mountain lake after a spring rainfall, you insensitive clod! I want to forget! I want to forget!
Am I missing something or is the PowerMac severely under spec'd and overpriced compared to the new iMac?
You're missing something. Namely this: Apple doesn't want to sell low-end PowerMacs.
I have no idea how much they make off of each system, but I think it's probable they make more selling a high-end iMac than a low-end PowerMac. They undoubtedly cost less to make overall. I imagine even the shipping costs make a difference. The PowerMac weighs almost 20 pounds more than the iMac. Multiply by thousands of units, and you get a big number.
There's also the feature differences between the two lines that might be important to some customers. Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, dual-monitor support, PCI slots, etc. Some PowerMac customers may need these things more than raw performance.
The number of people viewing avi's and wmv's are much larger than the number of people who are ready to view qt's.
... Quicktime7 is the same old qt format, but the program now has a better MPEG-4 stream handling plus an AVC handler?
.mov container as before. What has changed is QuickTime-the-software, which has been significantly upgraded. In other words, the file format was capable of things the software was not.
.mov, and it might support H.264, but it might not support H.264 inside .mov (this example might not be true, but such things do happen). The standard specifies only two container formats: .mp4 (based on QT), and .mpg (MPEG-2/DVD style muxed streams), so it's entirely possible that there's some limitation or difference in mplayer, et al.'s .MOV support that makes it not work. Likewise, Apple may use some part or "profile" of AVC that isn't supported by mplayer yet.
True, of course. I guess I blocked WMV from my mind because it isn't suitable for my own stuff. As for Real vs. QuickTime, I recall seeing numbers that put them very, very, close -- and as a creator, I would choose QT over Real any day -- I don't think I'm alone in that. In any event, the point was that QT7/H.264 is news because it's gone mainstream.
Also I am beginning to doubt my own understanding of MPEG-4.
It doesn't help that MPEG-4 is utterly bewildering.
So is quicktime7 a new format or not?
My understanding is that it is the same
But then in that case if they had released these trailers before qt7, the only people who would not be able to play them are the people with Quicktime players, while people with mplayer will have had no problems.
Not quite. It's more confusing than that. Players don't always support every format in every container that they support. mplayer might support
So, my conclusion there is "Maybe. MPEG-4 is confusing. My head hurts."
I've read elsewhere of people using H.264 video + MP3 audio inside AVI containers, which is so incredibly non-standard that it makes me dizzy.
For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.
QuickTime is a container format, that can, er contain many different codecs. In this case, the codec in question is H.264, which is currently only available in QuickTime 7. Same format, new codec.
Lastly I would like to ask the Mac experts about H.264. It seems that this codec is nothing new, and ffmpeg has supported it for a couple of years now.
ffmpeg might have had H.264 decoding support for a while, but definitely not " a few years", and encoding is till pretty fresh. As in : BIG FAT WARNING: x264 is still in early development stage. (Also, many of the other existing H.264 implementations don't follow the spec, and do stupid things like use AVI containers.)
Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not?
A little of both, with a dose of marketing. QuickTime was showing it's age -- QuickTime 6's MPEG-4 implementation was a joke, mostly because of assumptions made with QuickTime 1 that no longer hold true.
The marketing comes in when you consider that the installed base of QuickTime users is more likely to upgrade if you go on about HD and pristine quality and fast downloads than APIs and architectures. It's a lot easier to get people to upgrade when you have a carrot to dangle in front of them.
Why H.264 is such big news?
The news is that it is now supported natively by a popular content creation platform, with an installed content delivery platform that is (IIRC), second only to Flash. This means that you can create H.264 content and have the reasonable expectation that people will be able to view it.
You can use patches from it your apps with a single function call, make screen savers with it or run the compositions stand alone in Quicktime.
In theory, you could embed a composition in a web page, as part of a QuickTime movie. I don't now for sure, as I don't have QT Pro on this machine, but I'm eager to try it.
Quartz Composer is indeed truly badass.
Will the patches appear in Konqueror (KHTML)?
These *are* patches to KHTML.
Quoth TFA:
Fix parsing of the REL attribute on links.
Disallow TABLE inside P in strict mode.
And so on. It's all there.