Going from shared memory to protected memory was a big step for multitasking on the desktop, and since web applications are more and more complex, the same move needs to be made with browser design
Not really. Javascript doesn't allow arbitrary memory access, so there isn't any concept of an address space to share or separate. Nor is there any requirement that different web pages cannot execute concurrently.
This is a VM/Renderer implementation detail, so that a bug in the browser itself only impacts one tab, but it doesn't do anything to actually improve the current programming model. If you were confident enough in your browser to securely and reliably handle all input, then there is no advantage to using multiple host OS processes.
Can you provide an example of apple trying to violate the GPL? I just did a few google searches for things like "apple GPL violation", and every hit was unrelated. It doesn't look like anyone has even accused apple of GPL violations.
If they were on shaky legal ground for a GPL project (or outright defying the license), this article tells you all you need to know about how loudly the FSF would scream (and how few minutes it would take for a lawsuit to get filed).
But the FSF isn't doing that. They're proving themselves to be jerks, but they are not accusing apple of violating their license for any project.
What about a word processing document that supports a macro language, or a bundle of HTML+JavaScript+resources (one of those buzzword-compliant local web 2.0 RIA/flex/flash/AIR application thingies). In these cases, the user is implicitly opening an executable elsewhere on the system to handle the documents, and now you're trusting that application to properly validate and sandbox those document/programs.
OK, so you can also flag documents that contain executable data. But how is the system supposed to know what kind of documents those are.
An XML file? Well, each one of the nodes in that list are actually an opcode for some funny format...
Is a postscript file document or executable?
Documents and Executables are, in the general case, exactly the same thing. Trying to split them out and tell the user which one any given icon will be an interesting challenge. You should get right on it.
You're exactly right. It is missing the point without the interface. The real breakthrough in TM's UI isn't that the user can go retrieve a file as it was last week (with gratuitous 3D effects), but rather that they can go retrieve something that isn't a file.
What if you deleted that email you really wanted, or made a bad edit to a contact in your address book, or a photo in iPhoto/Picasa? These apps store lots of data in some kind of database. As a geek, you know that you need to find this database, move the current one aside, restore the old one, export the content you want from the app, move the current database back into place, and import the content you just extracted from the old database.
With TM, Your Mom opens Mail, and presses the TM button. She gets the same 'windows through time' view, listing her mailbox at each checkpoint. She selects the message(s), and hits the restore button, and it gets brought into the current database. She doesn't care how it gets represented on disk.
TM is implemented as file-based backup (with a few less common twists), but that isn't how the UI presented to the user. Without the UI, it's Yet Another Backup Solution.
I hate to play devil's advocate for AT&T, but during the iPhone activation process, the limitations of the data plan access are not hidden away in fine print. It is made very clear that the EDGE access is only for "email and web browsing".
Anyone have some insights on how this development will put money in the bank at Apple?
It is not to put money in the bank, it is a tool for Apple's survival (and they are in danger).
Microsoft is pushing WPE/XAML hard, and if PHB's start thinking that they can gain access to all these flashy new features while only alienating 10% of the users (those alternate platform wierdos), they'll go for it. If Firefox+Safari can push IE's share on windows down into the 60-75% range, then it distrupts Microsoft's intention to replace the web standards with their own proprietary technologies.
If Microsoft's plan succeeded, Apple would find itself with a consumer OS that couldn't view a lot of compelling content... (this same idea also neatly explains why Apple got into the media business, long before anybody had any idea that it would be so amazingly successful: otherwise, the world would have gone entirely to Windows Media, and apple's platform would have been left out in the cold).
It was a WiFi-borne hack and he was at Black Hat. So there were lots of sniffers going and everybody gets a copy of whatever he does.
So he just demoed (and thus released) the DoS, not the root exploit - which he DID have the code to perform but didn't want to release (by demoing). Except that the patch for this vunerability was released months ago. Yet that didn't stop him from (trying) to do the demo at Black Hat 2006, when there would have been just as many sniffers in the audience.
From someone who already threw out their credibility, that really doesn't inspire confidence.
SGI already sold most of the important OpenGL patents to Microsoft years ago, and it basically had no impact on OpenGL's development. The ARB has already announced that it is merging with the Khronos Group (which standardized OpenGL ES), and have taken the name and trademark with them. Basically, the OpenGL ARB have cut themselves loose from SGI, and SGI's future actions won't have any real impact on the development of the standard.
About the only part of OpenGL that SGI can sell at this point is perhaps their implementations (which would be specific to SGI hardware). And just about everyone who wants one of those already has one.
The OpenGL Architecture Review Board had already made arrangements for this, and is joining the non-profit Khronos standards group. The bankruptcy should not have much of an impact on OpenGL at all.
The dell only includes an Intel Integrated Extreme Graphics 2, with no dedicated VRAM. When it comes to graphics performance, there is no comparison (admittedly, the dell does include a 15" analong flat panel).
I've been working on a full-earth terrain renderer for the last year, similar in style to Keyhole or Worldwind. The addition of worldwide outlines on google is wonderful, because yesterday afternoon I finally started to add a google maps data source to my application. Until now, it limited to WMS servers such as http://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov./
It's not nearly complete yet, because I still haven't properly handled the projection google uses (so the image is off near the poles), and it breaks at high detail levels, but these should be easily fixed within the next couple days. It should easily scale to the best data Google offers in the future.
There is one screenshot at the bottom of the page. The quality is fairly low, but that's because it's being rendered on a 5 year old laptop (I'm currently away from home).
I'm not sure Zack Rusin's response is entirely well thought out. Hyatt links directly to the individual patch files for each of the bugs in KHTML. I've scanned through them, and there isn't much OS X specific at all, except in files that are explicitly platform specific.
In one of the other patches, an APPLE_CHANGES ifdef was actually replaced with entirely cross-platform code.
The KHTML team would understandably like every change in Safari to be packaged up into a nice little independant patch, but it realistically cannot work that way. I'm sure everyone who has tried to contribute to a project maintained by someone else has had to wait before their patch was (or was not) accepted, and Apple really can't wait on the KTML devs. They have a job that needs to get done by a particular deadline (a deadline that doesn't apply to the KHTML devs).
The patches posted by Hyatt look really well done to me, and not at all representative of what Rusin is accusing them.
This observation indicates that Apple has some interesting times ahead. A critical mass of multithreaded software is something that's going to take a long time to appear (years). As another poster said, it's a chicken-and-egg problem.
Due to their problems with Motorola 6-7 years ago, Apple was forced to go to dual CPUs for their desktop line, just for the marketing impact, even though it was mostly useless at the time. That effectively solved the chicken-and-egg problem, since almost every user who cared about performance on the mac has had dual processors for years (including developers). It also helps that Apple provides some good tools for debugging multithreaded programs.
The quantity and quality of multithreaded desktop software available for Mac OS X today is astounding, and far beyond what is available on windows or linux (I use linux on the desktop, full time, and Mac OS X part time). This includes both third party software, and Apple's own software (including their consumer stuff. iMovie's encoding engine loves SMP). As the focus shifts to parallel software, this is going to give Apple a really big advantage as the desktop software vendors on windows/linux try to shift gears (which will take years).
Admittedly, most of the ported games still do not use threads, or only do so for audio (as the parent poster said, retrofitting SMP support into an app is not easy. It's going to take a long time).
This would be the *third* time that a University has 'lost' my personal information as an applicant, either for undergraduate or graduate applications, during the last 4 years.
Perhaps future applications should seriously consider refusing to provide a SSN until they make it though the admissions process.
I'm still waiting on real data privacy laws too, even if they are California only.
For the same reason that general purpose computation isn't done on your GPU. A GPU gets it's performance from being able to do the same small task to a whole lot of data. A CPU needs to do a bunch of tasks to a small bit of data.
So, you need to multiply two vectors of a thousand floats each. Can the GPU do it faster? Yes. But not really, because there is an astounding minimum latency before the results of that computation can be recovered from the GPU. It's a *deep* pipeline. Even though the CPU will spend longer calculating, the results will be available immediatly, and you have much better turnaround time. If you were doing a million multiplies, the answer would be different. But outside of image processing/DSP work, you rarely find such operations.
Altivec (and MMX/SSE2/SSE3, although less useful), sit nicely in the middle, allowing you to operate on larger pieces of data in parallel without incurring the latency of a GPU operation, allowing excellent performance gains in quite a few common situations.
If desktop machines move towards concurrency, it could really give Apple a significant performance advantage.
Apple's performance problems truly began when Motorola proved incapable of getting the G4's clockspeeds to scale. They compensated by making the Powermac a largely dual processor line. This move was, of course, laughed at because of the absolutely terrible software support. At the time, Photoshop was really the only app that could use that processor, not even OS 9 really worked with it. This was the classic desktop dual-processor chicken-and-egg problem. No one wrote software, because no one had the hardware. Apple hinged the product's success on people being willing to buy the machine knowing that the second processor wouldn't do much until OS X finally shipped.
So now we find ourselves 5-6 years later.
The chicken-and-egg problem has largely solved itself. One part magically appeared, and given enough time, the other followed. An incredible amount of desktop software on OS X is multi-threaded (from OSS to shareware to commerical offerings), and demonstrates significant performance improvements when that other core is available. Most desktop software on other platforms (X11 and Windows apps), are still largely sequential, and it's going to take years for that to change. Apple's consumers are going to see a much larger, and more immediate, benefit as it becomes economical to grant the Powermac a couple more cores, and move dual core down to the consumer lines. The software is already there.
I don't believe that WoW's BT failure was the fault of BT, but rather a failure of the modifications that Blizzard made to BT.
Standard BT works on a tit-for-tat model, where you'll start out by getting some random chunk of a file on the good graces of the central host or another user. Other clients would have been given different random chunks. From that point, clients seek out other clients where a good trade can be made. This essentially ties your upload speed to your download speed. Leechers are the bane of any P2P system, and are largely shut out of the BT protocol.
Blizard modified the standard client to remove this restriction. Instead, users told the client their connection speed, and then the client would only upload at that rate. It would download as fast as new chunks could be found. This led to everyone on a fast connection setting their speed to 33.6, uploading at 1.5k/sec. The forums were full of users pleading others to turn the upload rates up, and just as many responses from other users saying they didn't want their downloads slowed from 300k to 275k/sec because they were saturating their upstream bandwidth. Essentially, Blizard's client became a way for some users to leech the file off of the rest, with no tit-for-tat balancing.
Had they kept the standard protocol, it would have worked out far better.
For $200 or less, go for the Canon Powershot line, specifically the Powershot A75. It can be found for $175 or less from reputable retailers. It uses AA batteries and CF cards, so there aren't any other big hidden expenses waiting (at the cost of larger size), and gets ~5 hours of life from a set of NiMH batteries, which is a heck of a lot better than anything out there.
The 85 and 95 will go beyond your price point, and only add some resolution, although the 95 adds a flip-out screen, which can be used to protect it if you just throw it in your pocket.
It's fairly small (still pocket sized, as long as you're not wearing tight jeans), takes excellent 3MP pictures (which print wonderfully at 5x7 when cropped a bit, haven't tried larger), and has the best lenses you'll find at that pricepoint. It also offers lots of manual controls (although with a menu interface).
I just bought one recently. My feeling is that once you crossed the $200 line, adding $200 only gets you small improvements in ability, until you cross the $800 dSLR line. There just isn't any point in paying more, unless you want a long zoom (~$350).
As a linux and firefox user, this is probably the wrong approach. Students should not be told that they must or must not use any particular piece of software as long as that software doesn't damage the network (I don't think IE causes nearly as many problems as p2p on college campuses).
My school has a slightly different way of dealing with this (at least for dorm computers): If your machine appears to be infected, they cut your internet access. Then, they'll fix your computer and give you a talk about security, but only once.
If you get infected again, you lose internet access, and don't get it back until you demonstrate that your machine has been reformatted. Every time. All of a sudden, even the most non-techie people start to be a little more careful, and start listening to you.
I'll try this myself: What does n represent in this case? The number of pages in google's database, the number of words or phrases in their database? The length of the search string?
I would really like to know where you came across this. Can point us to a discription of the algorithm?
Everyone seems to jump to the immediate conclusion that the iPod and iTMS are tools to try and convince people to switch platforms, but I don't quite believe that's entirely true. While the iPod is earning a lot of cash, I don't think they expected it to do this well. I think the real reason for the music push is fairly simple: not to draw new users to the platform, but merely to maintain it.
Consider, if Apple hadn't gone down the music path: The primary format of every player would be MP3+Windows Media, with WM slowly taking over as people rip CDs in whatever their computer defaults to, or whatever they download/buy. The moment the ability to play Windows Media files goes away (no one providing a player for the next revision of the formats), the mac dies as a multimedia platform. If your platform can't view the content that anyone is distributing, you're toast (very much like the.doc situation). Their entry into the music business was really forced, because no one else would provide the content that the platform needed to remain viable as a multimedia platform (and by extension, a useful desktop platform)
I've always assumed that such systems will slowly enter use through a mechanism similar to carpool lanes. The opening of special lanes in the freeway, where only automated driving can be used. One major advantage of this kind of approach, would be that it would be possible to install guides in every automated lane, which makes the entire task of automated driving that much easier.
If that is indeed the problem, under the Advanced menu in iTunes, you can batch convert any number of files to a newer (or older) version if ID3 tags, v2 included. It will copy over all information as necessary.
No. This was a problem even when only geeks used linux. Just because you are a 1337 h4x0r doesn't mean the interface doesn't matter.
My most recent example? I decided on the advice of a friend to try Fluxbox a few days ago. In fluxbox, pretty much all configuration of happens inside a context menu. Fluxbox was definitly designed for technical users, but that doesn't change the fact that this is *terrible* UI design. Why? let me count the ways:
- Error prone: if you move the mouse the wrong way, you have to drill through several levels of submenu to get back to where you want to be. Similarly, when you activate a menu item with a submenu, you have to drag the mouse straight across the current menu horizontally until it enters the submenu, then drag up or down to the item you want. If you do the natural motion (drag diagonally directly to the desired item), the mouse will almost invariably cross another submenu first, forcing you to go back and re-activate the menu you wanted.
- Bad choice of widget for the type of action necessary: Incrementing or derementing transparency levels as a menu item!? It takes ~20 clicks to go all the way from opaque to fully transparent.
- Slow: In keeping with the previous comments, actually making this menu system work takes time and concentration. Fluxbox devs and users may think they're cool for having 'every option at your fingertips', but actually getting to those fingertips takes longer than if they had brought up a conventional window with sliders and buttons.
There are a set of utilities that provide conventional GUIs for configuring these things, but they are quite incomplete feature-wise, and suffer from their own ugly interface problems. In addition, you have to restart fluxbox to see the changes. Things done in a preferences panel should take effect instantly, which gives the user the ability to experement easily, giving them, in effect, more control.
There's been a lot of research done on how menus should work, and submenus really slow users down. A lot. For this reason, Apple's UI guides recommend that under no circumstances should you ever have a submenu inside another submenu, to eliminate this nasty nesting.
Just because you or I are technical users doesn't change the fact that there are other interfaces for this functionality that are faster and more forgiving.
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Going from shared memory to protected memory was a big step for multitasking on the desktop, and since web applications are more and more complex, the same move needs to be made with browser design
Not really. Javascript doesn't allow arbitrary memory access, so there isn't any concept of an address space to share or separate. Nor is there any requirement that different web pages cannot execute concurrently.
This is a VM/Renderer implementation detail, so that a bug in the browser itself only impacts one tab, but it doesn't do anything to actually improve the current programming model. If you were confident enough in your browser to securely and reliably handle all input, then there is no advantage to using multiple host OS processes.
Not anymore, but not for lack of trying.
Can you provide an example of apple trying to violate the GPL? I just did a few google searches for things like "apple GPL violation", and every hit was unrelated. It doesn't look like anyone has even accused apple of GPL violations.
If they were on shaky legal ground for a GPL project (or outright defying the license), this article tells you all you need to know about how loudly the FSF would scream (and how few minutes it would take for a lawsuit to get filed).
But the FSF isn't doing that. They're proving themselves to be jerks, but they are not accusing apple of violating their license for any project.
Because it hasn't happened.
What is executable and what is data?
What about a word processing document that supports a macro language, or a bundle of HTML+JavaScript+resources (one of those buzzword-compliant local web 2.0 RIA/flex/flash/AIR application thingies). In these cases, the user is implicitly opening an executable elsewhere on the system to handle the documents, and now you're trusting that application to properly validate and sandbox those document/programs.
OK, so you can also flag documents that contain executable data. But how is the system supposed to know what kind of documents those are.
An XML file? Well, each one of the nodes in that list are actually an opcode for some funny format...
Is a postscript file document or executable?
Documents and Executables are, in the general case, exactly the same thing. Trying to split them out and tell the user which one any given icon will be an interesting challenge. You should get right on it.
You're exactly right. It is missing the point without the interface. The real breakthrough in TM's UI isn't that the user can go retrieve a file as it was last week (with gratuitous 3D effects), but rather that they can go retrieve something that isn't a file.
What if you deleted that email you really wanted, or made a bad edit to a contact in your address book, or a photo in iPhoto/Picasa? These apps store lots of data in some kind of database. As a geek, you know that you need to find this database, move the current one aside, restore the old one, export the content you want from the app, move the current database back into place, and import the content you just extracted from the old database.
With TM, Your Mom opens Mail, and presses the TM button. She gets the same 'windows through time' view, listing her mailbox at each checkpoint. She selects the message(s), and hits the restore button, and it gets brought into the current database. She doesn't care how it gets represented on disk.
See this screenshot: The user isn't browsing files, they are browsing contacts: http://scrap.dasgenie.com/images/017-TimeMachine.png
TM is implemented as file-based backup (with a few less common twists), but that isn't how the UI presented to the user. Without the UI, it's Yet Another Backup Solution.
if a product sells 100,000 units, it only takes a few dozen bloggers to encounter problems for the truth to come out
And the corollary: It only takes a few anecdotes to tarnish a generally reliable product.
I hate to play devil's advocate for AT&T, but during the iPhone activation process, the limitations of the data plan access are not hidden away in fine print. It is made very clear that the EDGE access is only for "email and web browsing".
Anyone have some insights on how this development will put money in the bank at Apple?
It is not to put money in the bank, it is a tool for Apple's survival (and they are in danger).
Microsoft is pushing WPE/XAML hard, and if PHB's start thinking that they can gain access to all these flashy new features while only alienating 10% of the users (those alternate platform wierdos), they'll go for it. If Firefox+Safari can push IE's share on windows down into the 60-75% range, then it distrupts Microsoft's intention to replace the web standards with their own proprietary technologies.
If Microsoft's plan succeeded, Apple would find itself with a consumer OS that couldn't view a lot of compelling content... (this same idea also neatly explains why Apple got into the media business, long before anybody had any idea that it would be so amazingly successful: otherwise, the world would have gone entirely to Windows Media, and apple's platform would have been left out in the cold).
So he just demoed (and thus released) the DoS, not the root exploit - which he DID have the code to perform but didn't want to release (by demoing). Except that the patch for this vunerability was released months ago. Yet that didn't stop him from (trying) to do the demo at Black Hat 2006, when there would have been just as many sniffers in the audience.
From someone who already threw out their credibility, that really doesn't inspire confidence.
SGI already sold most of the important OpenGL patents to Microsoft years ago, and it basically had no impact on OpenGL's development. The ARB has already announced that it is merging with the Khronos Group (which standardized OpenGL ES), and have taken the name and trademark with them. Basically, the OpenGL ARB have cut themselves loose from SGI, and SGI's future actions won't have any real impact on the development of the standard.
About the only part of OpenGL that SGI can sell at this point is perhaps their implementations (which would be specific to SGI hardware). And just about everyone who wants one of those already has one.
The OpenGL Architecture Review Board had already made arrangements for this, and is joining the non-profit Khronos standards group. The bankruptcy should not have much of an impact on OpenGL at all.
I'm sorry, but you can't expect a $499 computer to include a 6800U. A Radeon 9200/32MB is competive even with Dell. Comparing against a $550 dell: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx ?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=D30CVB2&s=dhs
The dell only includes an Intel Integrated Extreme Graphics 2, with no dedicated VRAM. When it comes to graphics performance, there is no comparison (admittedly, the dell does include a 15" analong flat panel).
I've been working on a full-earth terrain renderer for the last year, similar in style to Keyhole or Worldwind. The addition of worldwide outlines on google is wonderful, because yesterday afternoon I finally started to add a google maps data source to my application. Until now, it limited to WMS servers such as http://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov./
It's not nearly complete yet, because I still haven't properly handled the projection google uses (so the image is off near the poles), and it breaks at high detail levels, but these should be easily fixed within the next couple days. It should easily scale to the best data Google offers in the future.
There is one screenshot at the bottom of the page. The quality is fairly low, but that's because it's being rendered on a 5 year old laptop (I'm currently away from home).
http://cs.ucsb.edu/~richards/terrain/
I have no idea if I'll ship this with google maps support (since it is against their TOS), but it was fun to do.
I'm not sure Zack Rusin's response is entirely well thought out. Hyatt links directly to the individual patch files for each of the bugs in KHTML. I've scanned through them, and there isn't much OS X specific at all, except in files that are explicitly platform specific.
Look at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/acid3.txt as an example.
In one of the other patches, an APPLE_CHANGES ifdef was actually replaced with entirely cross-platform code.
The KHTML team would understandably like every change in Safari to be packaged up into a nice little independant patch, but it realistically cannot work that way. I'm sure everyone who has tried to contribute to a project maintained by someone else has had to wait before their patch was (or was not) accepted, and Apple really can't wait on the KTML devs. They have a job that needs to get done by a particular deadline (a deadline that doesn't apply to the KHTML devs).
The patches posted by Hyatt look really well done to me, and not at all representative of what Rusin is accusing them.
This observation indicates that Apple has some interesting times ahead. A critical mass of multithreaded software is something that's going to take a long time to appear (years). As another poster said, it's a chicken-and-egg problem.
Due to their problems with Motorola 6-7 years ago, Apple was forced to go to dual CPUs for their desktop line, just for the marketing impact, even though it was mostly useless at the time. That effectively solved the chicken-and-egg problem, since almost every user who cared about performance on the mac has had dual processors for years (including developers). It also helps that Apple provides some good tools for debugging multithreaded programs.
The quantity and quality of multithreaded desktop software available for Mac OS X today is astounding, and far beyond what is available on windows or linux (I use linux on the desktop, full time, and Mac OS X part time). This includes both third party software, and Apple's own software (including their consumer stuff. iMovie's encoding engine loves SMP). As the focus shifts to parallel software, this is going to give Apple a really big advantage as the desktop software vendors on windows/linux try to shift gears (which will take years).
Admittedly, most of the ported games still do not use threads, or only do so for audio (as the parent poster said, retrofitting SMP support into an app is not easy. It's going to take a long time).
This would be the *third* time that a University has 'lost' my personal information as an applicant, either for undergraduate or graduate applications, during the last 4 years.
Perhaps future applications should seriously consider refusing to provide a SSN until they make it though the admissions process.
I'm still waiting on real data privacy laws too, even if they are California only.
For the same reason that general purpose computation isn't done on your GPU. A GPU gets it's performance from being able to do the same small task to a whole lot of data. A CPU needs to do a bunch of tasks to a small bit of data.
So, you need to multiply two vectors of a thousand floats each. Can the GPU do it faster? Yes. But not really, because there is an astounding minimum latency before the results of that computation can be recovered from the GPU. It's a *deep* pipeline. Even though the CPU will spend longer calculating, the results will be available immediatly, and you have much better turnaround time. If you were doing a million multiplies, the answer would be different. But outside of image processing/DSP work, you rarely find such operations.
Altivec (and MMX/SSE2/SSE3, although less useful), sit nicely in the middle, allowing you to operate on larger pieces of data in parallel without incurring the latency of a GPU operation, allowing excellent performance gains in quite a few common situations.
If desktop machines move towards concurrency, it could really give Apple a significant performance advantage.
Apple's performance problems truly began when Motorola proved incapable of getting the G4's clockspeeds to scale. They compensated by making the Powermac a largely dual processor line. This move was, of course, laughed at because of the absolutely terrible software support. At the time, Photoshop was really the only app that could use that processor, not even OS 9 really worked with it. This was the classic desktop dual-processor chicken-and-egg problem. No one wrote software, because no one had the hardware. Apple hinged the product's success on people being willing to buy the machine knowing that the second processor wouldn't do much until OS X finally shipped.
So now we find ourselves 5-6 years later.
The chicken-and-egg problem has largely solved itself. One part magically appeared, and given enough time, the other followed. An incredible amount of desktop software on OS X is multi-threaded (from OSS to shareware to commerical offerings), and demonstrates significant performance improvements when that other core is available. Most desktop software on other platforms (X11 and Windows apps), are still largely sequential, and it's going to take years for that to change. Apple's consumers are going to see a much larger, and more immediate, benefit as it becomes economical to grant the Powermac a couple more cores, and move dual core down to the consumer lines. The software is already there.
I don't believe that WoW's BT failure was the fault of BT, but rather a failure of the modifications that Blizzard made to BT.
Standard BT works on a tit-for-tat model, where you'll start out by getting some random chunk of a file on the good graces of the central host or another user. Other clients would have been given different random chunks. From that point, clients seek out other clients where a good trade can be made. This essentially ties your upload speed to your download speed. Leechers are the bane of any P2P system, and are largely shut out of the BT protocol.
Blizard modified the standard client to remove this restriction. Instead, users told the client their connection speed, and then the client would only upload at that rate. It would download as fast as new chunks could be found. This led to everyone on a fast connection setting their speed to 33.6, uploading at 1.5k/sec. The forums were full of users pleading others to turn the upload rates up, and just as many responses from other users saying they didn't want their downloads slowed from 300k to 275k/sec because they were saturating their upstream bandwidth. Essentially, Blizard's client became a way for some users to leech the file off of the rest, with no tit-for-tat balancing.
Had they kept the standard protocol, it would have worked out far better.
For $200 or less, go for the Canon Powershot line, specifically the Powershot A75. It can be found for $175 or less from reputable retailers. It uses AA batteries and CF cards, so there aren't any other big hidden expenses waiting (at the cost of larger size), and gets ~5 hours of life from a set of NiMH batteries, which is a heck of a lot better than anything out there.
The 85 and 95 will go beyond your price point, and only add some resolution, although the 95 adds a flip-out screen, which can be used to protect it if you just throw it in your pocket.
It's fairly small (still pocket sized, as long as you're not wearing tight jeans), takes excellent 3MP pictures (which print wonderfully at 5x7 when cropped a bit, haven't tried larger), and has the best lenses you'll find at that pricepoint. It also offers lots of manual controls (although with a menu interface).
I just bought one recently. My feeling is that once you crossed the $200 line, adding $200 only gets you small improvements in ability, until you cross the $800 dSLR line. There just isn't any point in paying more, unless you want a long zoom (~$350).
As a linux and firefox user, this is probably the wrong approach. Students should not be told that they must or must not use any particular piece of software as long as that software doesn't damage the network (I don't think IE causes nearly as many problems as p2p on college campuses).
My school has a slightly different way of dealing with this (at least for dorm computers): If your machine appears to be infected, they cut your internet access. Then, they'll fix your computer and give you a talk about security, but only once.
If you get infected again, you lose internet access, and don't get it back until you demonstrate that your machine has been reformatted. Every time. All of a sudden, even the most non-techie people start to be a little more careful, and start listening to you.
I'll try this myself: What does n represent in this case? The number of pages in google's database, the number of words or phrases in their database? The length of the search string?
I would really like to know where you came across this. Can point us to a discription of the algorithm?
Everyone seems to jump to the immediate conclusion that the iPod and iTMS are tools to try and convince people to switch platforms, but I don't quite believe that's entirely true. While the iPod is earning a lot of cash, I don't think they expected it to do this well. I think the real reason for the music push is fairly simple: not to draw new users to the platform, but merely to maintain it.
.doc situation). Their entry into the music business was really forced, because no one else would provide the content that the platform needed to remain viable as a multimedia platform (and by extension, a useful desktop platform)
Consider, if Apple hadn't gone down the music path: The primary format of every player would be MP3+Windows Media, with WM slowly taking over as people rip CDs in whatever their computer defaults to, or whatever they download/buy. The moment the ability to play Windows Media files goes away (no one providing a player for the next revision of the formats), the mac dies as a multimedia platform. If your platform can't view the content that anyone is distributing, you're toast (very much like the
I've always assumed that such systems will slowly enter use through a mechanism similar to carpool lanes. The opening of special lanes in the freeway, where only automated driving can be used. One major advantage of this kind of approach, would be that it would be possible to install guides in every automated lane, which makes the entire task of automated driving that much easier.
If that is indeed the problem, under the Advanced menu in iTunes, you can batch convert any number of files to a newer (or older) version if ID3 tags, v2 included. It will copy over all information as necessary.
No. This was a problem even when only geeks used linux. Just because you are a 1337 h4x0r doesn't mean the interface doesn't matter.
My most recent example? I decided on the advice of a friend to try Fluxbox a few days ago. In fluxbox, pretty much all configuration of happens inside a context menu. Fluxbox was definitly designed for technical users, but that doesn't change the fact that this is *terrible* UI design. Why? let me count the ways:
- Error prone: if you move the mouse the wrong way, you have to drill through several levels of submenu to get back to where you want to be. Similarly, when you activate a menu item with a submenu, you have to drag the mouse straight across the current menu horizontally until it enters the submenu, then drag up or down to the item you want. If you do the natural motion (drag diagonally directly to the desired item), the mouse will almost invariably cross another submenu first, forcing you to go back and re-activate the menu you wanted.
- Bad choice of widget for the type of action necessary: Incrementing or derementing transparency levels as a menu item!? It takes ~20 clicks to go all the way from opaque to fully transparent.
- Slow: In keeping with the previous comments, actually making this menu system work takes time and concentration. Fluxbox devs and users may think they're cool for having 'every option at your fingertips', but actually getting to those fingertips takes longer than if they had brought up a conventional window with sliders and buttons.
There are a set of utilities that provide conventional GUIs for configuring these things, but they are quite incomplete feature-wise, and suffer from their own ugly interface problems. In addition, you have to restart fluxbox to see the changes. Things done in a preferences panel should take effect instantly, which gives the user the ability to experement easily, giving them, in effect, more control.
There's been a lot of research done on how menus should work, and submenus really slow users down. A lot. For this reason, Apple's UI guides recommend that under no circumstances should you ever have a submenu inside another submenu, to eliminate this nasty nesting.
Just because you or I are technical users doesn't change the fact that there are other interfaces for this functionality that are faster and more forgiving.