A lot of problems in Windows come from either poor drivers or low-quality components (which in turn often have old/poor drivers). For all of the flack we give MS, they do an alright job considering they have to support millions and millions of combinations of hardware. This isn't quite as true these days. The landscape is quite different today than it was 20 years ago when those claims were being made.
Legacy hardware might pose a problem, but these days, most component manufacturers have consolidated, standardized peripherals have become the norm, and there really aren't that many distinct/exotic types of hardware for Apple to support.
More and more hardware functions are being integrated directly into chipsets. Intel, AMD, VIA, and nVidia virtually own the entire market, and don't have terribly massive product lines. Of course, Apple already support most current Intel chipsets, given that they use them! Supporting non-intel chipsets would take a bit more effort, though it wouldn't be terribly difficult.
Also remember that Intel, AMD, nVidia, VIA all develop their own drivers. Given the "hotness" Apple currently has, I'm sure they'd be willing to support them on at least a few of their product lines. Also consider that F/OSS drivers also exist for most of these things, and that anything under the BSD license is fair-game to be used in OS X, or any other commercial OS.
Networking hardware either tags alongside the chipset, or is made by oen of a very small list of very large companies (Broadcom, and 3Com immediately coming to mind). Apple already support most common network chipsets due to variations in their own product lines over time, and the fact that Ethernet chipsets haven't changed all that much over the past few years.
Graphics are down to nVidia and ATI (AMD), both of which write their own drivers, and have a unified driver platform. Apple's dealt with both companies in the past, and supports both on OS X. No big deal there.
Apple uses CUPS for Printing, and shares its driver support with Linux (and most other Unices). Anything that doesn't fall under that umbrella is left to the manufacturers (with varying levels of success).
This is also another reason why Linux driver support has finally stabilized. The number of new hardware combinations to support has gone dramatically down from the 90s, and the community is now able to focus on writing a small number of high-quality drivers. Standardized interfaces with pre-defined device classes (eg. USB and 1394) have also made a tremendous impact.
Say what you want about the consolidation of computer hardware manufacturers. However, it's undeniable that driver support has gotten immesurably less complicated.
They've publically stated that they've tried to bring the streaming service to Mac users, but couldn't find a DRM platform that was acceptable to their content providers that worked on MacOS.
Heck. Look at what John McCain needed to do in order to get the republican nomination.
"Moderation" is notoriously difficult to sell, despite the fact that moderate-yet-progressive policies tend to be the most effective and popular in the long-run.
"Revolutionary" policies are more often than not dangerous and completely ineffective. Imagine if we actually *did* build huge solar arrays using 1980s technology? (Here's a hint: you used considerably more energy manufacturing those panels than they would ever "generate" over their rather short lifespan, and produced some really nasty by-products in the process)
Even the "conservatives" (who by very definition should know better) attempted a "revolution" in the 1980s with Reganomics and Thatcher's privatization efforts, which, twenty years later, are starting to have some disasterous results, whilst its supporters continue to encourage us to "let things play out," eerily reminiscent to the Marxists' calls to allow communism to play its course in Societ Russia, whilst its people were starving to death.
Even the glorified American revolution was a mess, and it was only by a small miracle that The Constitution managed to appease any sort of violent counter-revolution after the Articles of Confederation failed.
To me, Greenpeace is almost completely irrelevant as an organization, and have lost pretty much all of their credibility. They oppose everything, and offer very few practical solutions to the world's ills, whilst continuing to decry virtually anything fashionable or popular.
As a result of their anti-nuclear tactics, construction of new nuclear plants stopped, and a great many coal plants were constructed instead, which had a far more hazardous effect on the environment as a whole. Heck.... wildlife in the areas around Chernobyl are doing quite well thanks to the complete lack of human activity in the area.
Instead of encouraging us to all drive electric cars, the enviromentalists should have been promoting hybrids as a reasonably practical segue into developing electric cars. Now that hybrids have been proven to be practical and effective, companies are turning their attention to plug-in hybrids and true EVs.
Instead of demanding full and widespread adoption of wind and solar power, they should have been encouraging experiments with small-scale wind and solar farms, as well as more R&D into those two technologies. Small wind farms have slowly proven to be practical and economical in certain areas, and if NanoSolar can keep true to their word on production costs, we should be seeing solar panels being printed onto every exterior surface imaginable over the next few years.
The thing is....you can't force a revolution. GreenPeace need to learn that they might actually have a chance of achieving their goals by lightly prodding industry and consumers in the right direction.
Instead of proclaiming "GAMES, NINTENDO EVIL," perhaps they could instead publish a headline such as "Greenpeace study finds that Nintendo could drastically cut landfill waste by using biodegradable hemp-based plastics for just $0.02USD per unit"
Perhaps that's a bit of a mouthful, but it's a lot more likely to provoke a response from the public: "Hey, why don't they do that? Sounds awfully selfish of them not to," and a resoponse from the company: "Hey, why don't we do this? It'll help us improve our image, and won't cost much"
That's absolute insanity. Why isn't that story gaining more attention?
We've got no money to spend whatsoever on civilian projects, and yet Bush continues to uncontrollably spend money on unnecessary warmongering projects.
My favorite carrier offers unlimited texting for $20 per month. The way his daughters send messages he's getting them at 1/4 cent apiece. Your daughters send 267 messages/day?
My main gripe still is, though, that these boats don't look quite big or heavy enough to have a keel big enough to do what you're describing.
You're also absolutely right about bits of the boat breaking under stress. A few months ago, I saw a big gust break one of the stays off of a Firefly, subsequently causing the mast to snap in half, under what were otherwise fairly reasonable conditions. This is particularly notable, considering that Fireflies have a fairly small sail area, and a big beefy aluminium mast.
RTFA. This actually is analogous to house-arrest, and would only be used under similar circumstances.
The students in the program were given the option of either submitting to GPS monitoring, or being placed in Juvenile Detention.
Whether or not you agree with the concept of house arrest, this seems like a logical extension of that concept to troubled youths.
Personally, I think this seems to have a much greater possibility of actually working than sticking all of the troubled students together in a prison-like environment.
At the very least, it's better than any of the other alternatives on the table.
Do you really know what you are talking about? Yes, I do know what I'm talking about, and agree that these might not necessarily be huge difficulties to overcome.
I maintain my original argument that you can't sail across the atlantic in a straight line, which was all that I was stating in my original post.
If you want to get really advanced, choosing the "optimal" course to sail along might actually be a fairly interesting problem to solve computationally, if you want to take meteorological data and forecasts into account, and update them along the way to choose the best course, while also avoiding lulls, obstacles and storms.
A boat that size usually depends upon the weight of its crew to keep it balanced. Similarly, unless it's got an absolutely immense keel, it can easily tip over into the water.
In the event that the boat completely inverts itself, which is fairly likely because the weight of the sails and mast often account for a considerable portion of the weight of the craft, it could become virtually impossible for the boat to "right itself". Also remember that the sails generate a good deal of underwater "resistance" that make it even more difficult to right the boat.
Yes, if you want to get technical, an electron doesn't have any definable volume.
However, they do have mass, and in the case of a large atom, are several orders of magnitude less massive than their nucleus.
I'm no expert in this area, although I believe that the concept of "volume" itself starts to become rather fuzzy once you go much smaller than a Proton (although, yes -- there are several particles smaller than the proton that we have evidence for, although it is difficult to directly describe these as "solid matter")
I hear that the mass-market passenger version that they're planning to build a few years later, Zeppelin Me! might be somewhat unreliable.
Best hold out for Zeppelin 2000 or Zeppelin XP.
Zeppelin Vista will be terrible as well, although the screening process will be so invasive and draconian, that you'll probably never actually make it onto the ship anyway...
You're forgetting one of Islam's most distinguishing traits.
The texts make very clear reference to the idea that there should be no compulsion in religion. It's one of the most frequently emphasized and repeated themes running throughout it.
Although it's an inherently biased source, this page contains a good number of direct quotes supporting the above points.
Say what you will about the rest of the religion, but the Quran is crystal-clear on this issue.
If Islam spreads throughout Europe, it will be the result of cultural osmosis, just as was the case in Lebanon (which was inevitably bound to happen due the fall of European colonialism in general around that same time).
The notion of an "Islamic Crusade" is ironic at best.
Now, if they were to make an LCD panel that aside from the R,G,B pixel elements also had C M Y pixel elements, then you most certainly could increase the gamut. It would also be much more difficult to switch to than a simple bitdepth change. That would make no sense on an LCD display, given that CMY is a subtractive color model, whilst color is achieved on LCDs via additive blending.
Although adding another "primary" color should increase your gamut, CMY might not be the best choice of colors to use in that case.
Think of RGB mixing is analogous to shining three different-colored flashlights at a white target, the complete overlap of which should also be white.
CMY color mixing is analogous to taking three different colored sheets of glass, and layering them on top of each other. A complete overlap should be completely black).
To implement subtractive color mixing, we'd first need a revolutionary change in display technology. By their very nature, LCDs are incapable of subtractive blending.
Modern monitors use an additive method of color blending, while printers (by their very nature) must use subtractive blending.
The range of colors that can be reproduced by a 24-bit RGB device is always going to be different from the range of colors that a 24-bit CMY device can reproduce.
By the same note, a 24-bit RGB display can produce colors that the CMY printer cannot.
One color space isn't bigger than the other; they're simply different. Once you increase the bit-depth far enough to encompass the full spectrum of visible light for both color spaces, the distinction can finally be dropped.
Although today's monitors are fairly good at color reproduction, they could easily benefit from extra dynamic range, which LCDs have never been particularly good at. Although the article lacks technical depth, it can be inferred that the extra 6 bits will be used as an alpha channel, to adjust the brightness of each pixel, which should comfortably solve the dynamic range problem once and for all if it works.
Similarly, in the visual arts industry, it is absolutely necessary for an image on the screen to look as close as possible to the final product on print or in film. It is also important for these colors to be consistent between systems, especially when multiple artists are working on the same project.
It might be a niche industry, but if HP are able to improve the status quo, they should be able to sell more than a few. The fact that they've hinted that these improvements will be inexpensive to implement simply translates to a benefit for everyday folks.
Also, in terms of how much room screens have to improve, take at the print in a phone book or the financials section of a newspaper. Then compare that to the smallest font you can comfortably read on your monitor.
Even for boring business applications, there are many benefits to be had from higher-resolution displays.
Slashdot Mirror
Legacy hardware might pose a problem, but these days, most component manufacturers have consolidated, standardized peripherals have become the norm, and there really aren't that many distinct/exotic types of hardware for Apple to support.
More and more hardware functions are being integrated directly into chipsets. Intel, AMD, VIA, and nVidia virtually own the entire market, and don't have terribly massive product lines. Of course, Apple already support most current Intel chipsets, given that they use them! Supporting non-intel chipsets would take a bit more effort, though it wouldn't be terribly difficult.
Also remember that Intel, AMD, nVidia, VIA all develop their own drivers. Given the "hotness" Apple currently has, I'm sure they'd be willing to support them on at least a few of their product lines. Also consider that F/OSS drivers also exist for most of these things, and that anything under the BSD license is fair-game to be used in OS X, or any other commercial OS.
Networking hardware either tags alongside the chipset, or is made by oen of a very small list of very large companies (Broadcom, and 3Com immediately coming to mind). Apple already support most common network chipsets due to variations in their own product lines over time, and the fact that Ethernet chipsets haven't changed all that much over the past few years.
Graphics are down to nVidia and ATI (AMD), both of which write their own drivers, and have a unified driver platform. Apple's dealt with both companies in the past, and supports both on OS X. No big deal there.
Apple uses CUPS for Printing, and shares its driver support with Linux (and most other Unices). Anything that doesn't fall under that umbrella is left to the manufacturers (with varying levels of success).
This is also another reason why Linux driver support has finally stabilized. The number of new hardware combinations to support has gone dramatically down from the 90s, and the community is now able to focus on writing a small number of high-quality drivers. Standardized interfaces with pre-defined device classes (eg. USB and 1394) have also made a tremendous impact.
Say what you want about the consolidation of computer hardware manufacturers. However, it's undeniable that driver support has gotten immesurably less complicated.
They've publically stated that they've tried to bring the streaming service to Mac users, but couldn't find a DRM platform that was acceptable to their content providers that worked on MacOS.
Absolutely true.
Heck. Look at what John McCain needed to do in order to get the republican nomination.
"Moderation" is notoriously difficult to sell, despite the fact that moderate-yet-progressive policies tend to be the most effective and popular in the long-run.
"Revolutionary" policies are more often than not dangerous and completely ineffective. Imagine if we actually *did* build huge solar arrays using 1980s technology? (Here's a hint: you used considerably more energy manufacturing those panels than they would ever "generate" over their rather short lifespan, and produced some really nasty by-products in the process)
Even the "conservatives" (who by very definition should know better) attempted a "revolution" in the 1980s with Reganomics and Thatcher's privatization efforts, which, twenty years later, are starting to have some disasterous results, whilst its supporters continue to encourage us to "let things play out," eerily reminiscent to the Marxists' calls to allow communism to play its course in Societ Russia, whilst its people were starving to death.
Even the glorified American revolution was a mess, and it was only by a small miracle that The Constitution managed to appease any sort of violent counter-revolution after the Articles of Confederation failed.
Learn how to choose your battles.
To me, Greenpeace is almost completely irrelevant as an organization, and have lost pretty much all of their credibility. They oppose everything, and offer very few practical solutions to the world's ills, whilst continuing to decry virtually anything fashionable or popular.
As a result of their anti-nuclear tactics, construction of new nuclear plants stopped, and a great many coal plants were constructed instead, which had a far more hazardous effect on the environment as a whole. Heck.... wildlife in the areas around Chernobyl are doing quite well thanks to the complete lack of human activity in the area.
Instead of encouraging us to all drive electric cars, the enviromentalists should have been promoting hybrids as a reasonably practical segue into developing electric cars. Now that hybrids have been proven to be practical and effective, companies are turning their attention to plug-in hybrids and true EVs.
Instead of demanding full and widespread adoption of wind and solar power, they should have been encouraging experiments with small-scale wind and solar farms, as well as more R&D into those two technologies. Small wind farms have slowly proven to be practical and economical in certain areas, and if NanoSolar can keep true to their word on production costs, we should be seeing solar panels being printed onto every exterior surface imaginable over the next few years.
The thing is....you can't force a revolution. GreenPeace need to learn that they might actually have a chance of achieving their goals by lightly prodding industry and consumers in the right direction.
Instead of proclaiming "GAMES, NINTENDO EVIL," perhaps they could instead publish a headline such as "Greenpeace study finds that Nintendo could drastically cut landfill waste by using biodegradable hemp-based plastics for just $0.02USD per unit"
Perhaps that's a bit of a mouthful, but it's a lot more likely to provoke a response from the public: "Hey, why don't they do that? Sounds awfully selfish of them not to," and a resoponse from the company: "Hey, why don't we do this? It'll help us improve our image, and won't cost much"
The problem with MBAs? Arrogance.
Engineering and IT are two very distinct areas.
Some would argue that they barely overlap at all.
Don't forget Nevermind by Nirvana.
He seems to have turned out okay (although I imagine that it could make dating somewhat awkward)
$35 billion for a fueling tanker!?
That's absolute insanity. Why isn't that story gaining more attention?
We've got no money to spend whatsoever on civilian projects, and yet Bush continues to uncontrollably spend money on unnecessary warmongering projects.
The PIN is useless without the Card(Chip) and vice versa.
That's the whole point of the system. Unless you get mugged by the security guard watching the cameras, you shouldn't have too much to worry about.
(And like the other poster said, it's pretty trivial to cover the number pad with your other hand)
Mod parent up. He makes a few very good points.
My main gripe still is, though, that these boats don't look quite big or heavy enough to have a keel big enough to do what you're describing.
You're also absolutely right about bits of the boat breaking under stress. A few months ago, I saw a big gust break one of the stays off of a Firefly, subsequently causing the mast to snap in half, under what were otherwise fairly reasonable conditions. This is particularly notable, considering that Fireflies have a fairly small sail area, and a big beefy aluminium mast.
RTFA. This actually is analogous to house-arrest, and would only be used under similar circumstances.
The students in the program were given the option of either submitting to GPS monitoring, or being placed in Juvenile Detention.
Whether or not you agree with the concept of house arrest, this seems like a logical extension of that concept to troubled youths.
Personally, I think this seems to have a much greater possibility of actually working than sticking all of the troubled students together in a prison-like environment.
At the very least, it's better than any of the other alternatives on the table.
I maintain my original argument that you can't sail across the atlantic in a straight line, which was all that I was stating in my original post.
If you want to get really advanced, choosing the "optimal" course to sail along might actually be a fairly interesting problem to solve computationally, if you want to take meteorological data and forecasts into account, and update them along the way to choose the best course, while also avoiding lulls, obstacles and storms.
You've also got to account for obstacles (admittedly not many) and currents (which could be very significant for such a small boat).
Not necessarily if it's a sailboat.
A boat that size usually depends upon the weight of its crew to keep it balanced. Similarly, unless it's got an absolutely immense keel, it can easily tip over into the water.
In the event that the boat completely inverts itself, which is fairly likely because the weight of the sails and mast often account for a considerable portion of the weight of the craft, it could become virtually impossible for the boat to "right itself". Also remember that the sails generate a good deal of underwater "resistance" that make it even more difficult to right the boat.
Although missile defense may be a waste of money, the objectives of the program seem somewhat clear to me (eg. to defend against missiles!)
Yes, if you want to get technical, an electron doesn't have any definable volume.
However, they do have mass, and in the case of a large atom, are several orders of magnitude less massive than their nucleus.
I'm no expert in this area, although I believe that the concept of "volume" itself starts to become rather fuzzy once you go much smaller than a Proton (although, yes -- there are several particles smaller than the proton that we have evidence for, although it is difficult to directly describe these as "solid matter")
I hear that the mass-market passenger version that they're planning to build a few years later, Zeppelin Me! might be somewhat unreliable.
Best hold out for Zeppelin 2000 or Zeppelin XP.
Zeppelin Vista will be terrible as well, although the screening process will be so invasive and draconian, that you'll probably never actually make it onto the ship anyway...
You're forgetting one of Islam's most distinguishing traits.
The texts make very clear reference to the idea that there should be no compulsion in religion. It's one of the most frequently emphasized and repeated themes running throughout it.
Although it's an inherently biased source, this page contains a good number of direct quotes supporting the above points.
Say what you will about the rest of the religion, but the Quran is crystal-clear on this issue.
If Islam spreads throughout Europe, it will be the result of cultural osmosis, just as was the case in Lebanon (which was inevitably bound to happen due the fall of European colonialism in general around that same time).
The notion of an "Islamic Crusade" is ironic at best.
Although adding another "primary" color should increase your gamut, CMY might not be the best choice of colors to use in that case.
Think of RGB mixing is analogous to shining three different-colored flashlights at a white target, the complete overlap of which should also be white.
CMY color mixing is analogous to taking three different colored sheets of glass, and layering them on top of each other. A complete overlap should be completely black).
To implement subtractive color mixing, we'd first need a revolutionary change in display technology. By their very nature, LCDs are incapable of subtractive blending.
Modern monitors use an additive method of color blending, while printers (by their very nature) must use subtractive blending.
The range of colors that can be reproduced by a 24-bit RGB device is always going to be different from the range of colors that a 24-bit CMY device can reproduce.
By the same note, a 24-bit RGB display can produce colors that the CMY printer cannot.
One color space isn't bigger than the other; they're simply different. Once you increase the bit-depth far enough to encompass the full spectrum of visible light for both color spaces, the distinction can finally be dropped.
Although today's monitors are fairly good at color reproduction, they could easily benefit from extra dynamic range, which LCDs have never been particularly good at. Although the article lacks technical depth, it can be inferred that the extra 6 bits will be used as an alpha channel, to adjust the brightness of each pixel, which should comfortably solve the dynamic range problem once and for all if it works.
Similarly, in the visual arts industry, it is absolutely necessary for an image on the screen to look as close as possible to the final product on print or in film. It is also important for these colors to be consistent between systems, especially when multiple artists are working on the same project.
It might be a niche industry, but if HP are able to improve the status quo, they should be able to sell more than a few. The fact that they've hinted that these improvements will be inexpensive to implement simply translates to a benefit for everyday folks.
Also, in terms of how much room screens have to improve, take at the print in a phone book or the financials section of a newspaper. Then compare that to the smallest font you can comfortably read on your monitor.
Even for boring business applications, there are many benefits to be had from higher-resolution displays.
That applies to Cable news only.
Given that CNN is their only major competitor (and also kind of sucks), that's not exactly huge news.