My P3/550 with 512MB RAM from early 2000 (fair enough, it only came with 128MB) had no problems running Windows XP. Just turn off all visual effects, don't install things you don't need, and make sure it stays spyware-free and it made a decent web browsing machine (I gave it to my roommate in early 2005 and he used it until summer 2006).
The Macs got color in 1987, with the advent of the Mac II. The Mac OS didn't take full advantage of color (displaying windows, backgrounds, etc) until System 7, though. For the record, System 7 was released in May 1991, and Windows 3.0 came out in May 1990.
No, both neutrons and neutrinos carry no charge, but they're different particles--neutrons are baryons (made from three quarks), whereas neutrinos are leptons.
I bought one of those used in mid-1999 from a salvage yard for $350. The manufacturing date is February 1996, and it works perfectly (except for an ever-so-slight discoloration in the lower right corner). HIGHLY recommended, it's been on for a large chunk of the past 4 years and still works like a dream (and they're probably really cheap these days).
I don't think Dennis needs a reason to laugh at anyone--he'll find it (his irreverence is refreshing, although he behaves himself when Jill's in the control room). I don't know when she got one--last November, maybe? It is in one of those server-style cases, two CPUs, and two 20" monitors. It's very nice, even though I have yet to use it.
You know the whole backup thing at the 90 inch only works if you remember to bring tapes up with you (which I forget on a regular basis but you know I'm a closet blonde). I just sftp my data back to multiple computers back at Steward to take care of the problem:0 The KPNO system is very nice- the Save the Bits archive makes multiple tapes of the data that get stored in the 4 meter and down in town and data gets ftp'd down to one of the NOAO Tucson servers as well. So it's on hard drive in multiple places as well as on tape in multiple places as well. As to Stromlo- somebody brought down all the backup tapes to Canberra on Friday (the day before the fire) so most of the data was saved. Unfortunately though a lot of us astro people are going to suffer in the near future when DAT drives stop being the best way to store our data. ..hell I have a desk drawer of DAT and DLT tapes as well as CD ROMs with data right now!
Heh, as an added bonus, Dennis will laugh at you if you forget the tapes. Of course, I just scp it to Jill's new gargantuan Linux box, my workstation at Steward, and my home computer, so that there's practically no danger of something bad happening to all copies (since the data directory on bokobs gets wiped at the end of each observing run). I've never used the 4 meter, but its method of data-saving does sound quite nice.
Oh, and I just back up everything to CD-R these days. Much more cost-effective than a tape drive for as little as I go observing.
Speaking as an astronomy student (who has been on several observing runs), SOP at Kitt Peak is to collect all the data from each run over the course of several nights, store it on the computer that controls the CCD (a SparcStation 5 at the Bok 90", in case you were wondering) and then when the run is over, the data is 1) scp'ed back to our main system at the university, and 2) backed up on tape (actually, this is done nightly). Hence, if we had a fire at Kitt Peak or Mt. Lemmon or some other nearby observatory, all the data would be safe (replacing the CCDs would be really freaking expensive, though).
Astronomers know all too well the value of a good backup--besides, the computers at the observatory itself are too busy/slow to do data reduction, necessitating the existence of off-site copies.
I basically agree with you, but I'm not sure there's anything wrong with American passenger sedans from a safety perspective. Many people, especially on the west coast, think American cars are ugly or poorly made, but I don't think it is fair to say that they suffer from a true saftey problem.
There's nothing wrong with American passenger sedans from a safety perspective (generally speaking), but Japanese/European passenger sedans are usually the highest-scoring cars in crash tests. Also, there tend to be fewer safety fiascos like the Ford Focus and Ford Explorer from Japanese and European manufacturers. When I said "don't endanger other drivers/passengers", I meant relative to large SUVs, not American cars (I think a Toyota Sequoia endangers other drivers as much as, say, a GMC Yukon). Sorry for any confusion.
Better yet, it might be wise to bring back the days when cars were built almost entirely out of steel, not out of plastic and sheet metal like they are today. Those old cars could withstand collisions with just about anything short of a tractor/trailer (lorry for you Brits), and sometimes even then. You could actually walk away from a 20mph crash, instead of having to call for an ambulance.
Sorry, but that's a common fallacy. See, when you have a collision between two objects, the kinetic energy has to be dissipated somewhere. In older cars, the body/chassis of the car didn't deform, which meant that the kinetic energy was (in many cases) transferred to the people inside. Modern cars crumple on impact so the people inside don't. Hence, if you were in a car from 1960, the car would have a dent while the people would be gravely injured, while the same accident in a 2000 -model car would probably total the car, but the occupants could walk away.
If you can make a new car as crash-resistant as an old one, without using steel, that'll be great. If not... well, I care more about my safety than I do about miles per gallon. I agree that most people don't need gas guzzlers such as SUV's, but the sacrifice of auto safety on the altar of the environment has been going on for way too long.
SUVs are not safer for the driver/occupants, and significantly more dangerous for other people on the road. Hence, each large SUV bought is a net decrease in total road safety, as well as fuel economy. If everyone drove Japanese/European passenger sedans, the roads would be significantly safer than they are now, since those cars routinely score the highest on IIHTS/NHTSA crash tests and don't endanger other drivers/passengers.
Oh god no, you don't want just Liboff to learn QM with. That is, unless your lecturer is really good--ours is decent, but the class is at 8 AM so it's a moot point--I'm currently in Quantum Theory II, the highest undergrad QM class at U of Arizona, and the text is Liboff. I, and several others, bought Griffiths on our own to get a good general understanding of what's going on, and then refer back to Liboff to look for the quantitative bits that are absent from Liboff.
All are better than Goswami, though.
BTW, with reference to this article, if you know math up through differential equations and want to learn about QM, I highly recommend Griffiths' book. It's not a reference text like Liboff, but it contains more than enough math so that it's not handwavy.
It seems that third-world nations, which don't have the option of pouring money down a never-ending sink hole, understand what so many organizations (such as the US military) don't: that free software, in addition to having zero license costs, also has a much lower TCO due to its ability to scale up/down to fit the available hardware, and the ease of management (update all the school's machines? not a problem with rsync, for example)
The only problem is, India's IT sector seems permanently wedded to Microsoft. However, if the new generation can grow up exposed to BSD and Linux and understand that MS isn't always the best option, then maybe some much-needed competition on the desktop will finally develop on a global scale.
We didn't sell battleships to the British for $1 each, we traded old, decrepit destroyers to them in exchange for leases on some of their North Atlantic military bases (which we still control).
The Russians won the Eastern front for many reasons, not least of which was the newly-developed industrial complex that Stalin built east of the Urals in the '30s, the brilliance of people like Zhukov, and the bravery and courage of the Soviet citizens, who didn't surrender Leningrad or Moscow, and resisted fiercely in occupied territory. Sure, our supplies and money helped, but Russia really made the difference in the European theater.
Actually, I read on Apple's site in their system profiles (couldn't find the link, which is why I pointed to lowendmac.com) that 9 is supported on it. And, having a friend with an old 7100, I can attest that it will run OS 9 without a problem (eg you don't have to play tricks with the installer to get it to work, like you would with 9.2.x on the same machine, or OS X on a 7300-9600, or Born Again/OS 8 on an '030).
Actually they did resurrect the SE/30 in the form of the Classic II. (The Mac Classic was about SE speed IIRC).
No, the Classic II was pretty much a bottom-of-the-line LC II in a Classic case, and a poor replacement for the SE/30 (no expansion slots, 10 MB RAM ceiling as opposed to 128MB for the SE/30, and a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit data bus), although it was significantly cheaper. A resurrected SE/30 at the time would have been a Quadra 700 in a Classic case, which would have been a kick-ass machine back in October 1991..
in that "Hackers" book by Stephen Levy.. but i dont remember the exact idea... something in San Francisco and a terminal in the wall -- maybe someone else could elaborate
Lee Felsenstein and his "Community Memory" project in the late '60s and early '70s. He wanted to start a non-profit to install a public-access computer with terminals, so that everybody could have access to a computer. His idea was rendered obsolete by Steven Wozniak and Ed Roberts, and their personal computers.
Well, the BSDs don't ship with very much GNU software at all (although you'll still have to use GCC). As a bonus, updating it is trivial using the ports tree and cvsup, which are included with all the BSDs (except Darwin/Mac OS X, which uses fink, which works kind of like Debian's apt).
I despise info. give me man.
All the BSDs have excellent man pages, and FreeBSD has a top-notch handbook. As an example, try 'man firstboot' to find out what to do after you boot the system for the first time.
I don't want no emacs, give me vi or give me death.
The BSDs ship with the 'real' vi, not vim, and don't install emacs by default. You have to install it yourself (although that's easy--an emacs package ships on the FreeBSD install CD, or 'cd/usr/ports/editors/emacs; make install')
The fact that they feel the need to put GNU in the name of the distribution tells me tha they are too ideologically pure to do the best thing for the users.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin. No GNU there.
Of course, many commercial Unices (and OS X) have these features too, but sadly none of them (except for Slowaris^WSolaris) run on the x86 box you probably use.
The major downside to the BSDs is (x86) hardware support, although if you've been using Linux for more than a couple of years, it's nothing you're not used to.
I agree. I've been using Linux and FreeBSD since 1995, and just recently bought a Mac. OS X is, quite simply, fabulous (despite the interface issues, which I expect will get ironed out soon enough).
I've heard a lot on/. about how Macs do not appeal to geeks, but I think they might. How many Linux/Unix coder geeks really care about Photoshop and computer graphics (besides rendering?) Judging from what I've seen of KDE/GNOME splash screens (with the exception of Ximian), I'd say not very many. There are some of us out there who want access to a command line and a top-notch development environment, but also might want to create movies and modify images without learning Photoshop (or GIMP) or Premiere, or spending the money on these applications. That's really the appeal of the (new) Mac experience to many geeks: top-notch consumer OS, with the Unix functionality built-in.
In fact, here in the Physics department, I've watched a fair amount of people switch from Sun/SGI to Linux, or Mac OS X (and even some from Linux to OS X), because it runs their applications, is cheaper than new SGIs/Suns, and just works right away, unlike (sorry) Linux.
It'd be pretty cool if they could release (eventually) a version for PowerPC with some OS X binary compatibility, so those of us with older Power Macs (such as my 7600) that can't run OS X very well, or at all, could install this and have at least some OS X-ish functionality (I don't see why this couldn't be reasonably possible, since Lesstif and WINE have some degree of binary compatibility with Motif and Win32, respectively, and it should be quite a bit easier to implement GNUStep/Cocoa binary compatibility than Win32/WINE compatibility). Also, they wouldn't have to worry about hardware compatibility issues, since it'd be running natively on PowerPC.
This matters why? I mean, sure, they have to update the textbooks, but why is this worth researching, let alone newsworthy? Can this problem help us solve other problems that need to be solved?
Any astrophysicists mind?
Well, as a budding astrophysicist (undergrad physics/astronomy major at UofA), planetary/stellar evolution is quite an important area of research (in fact, a whole branch of astronomy focuses on this. It's even a separate degree program at some schools--planetary science). Also, forgetting to account for the radiation of energy and the resultant decrease in mass seems to be a fairly major oversight, in violation of some of the most basic concepts of orbital motion, such as the fact that the downward force due to gravity (and, hence, responsible for the behavior of orbits) is proportional to the mass of the central object and inversely proportional to the radius squared. Decrease the mass, and the force decreases, resulting in a change in the dynamics of Earth's movement, and increasing the perihelion and aphelion.
This is worth researching because Earth and its fate is somewhat important to us, for reasons that should be obvious. This will help us model the evolution of the solar system up to the white-dwarf stage, one which will be reached by most main-sequence stars (we think).
Is it only me who has a hard time imagining people born in the 80's being able to walk and talk? Imagine that there are people using computers today who weren't even around when the C-64 was introduced! Heck, a person born at the same time as the Amiga was born would be 17 years old today!! Damn, I feel old.
Well, I was born in 1980 and I have a hard time imagining people born much later than me walking/talking/driving/etc. I have a lot of memories from 1985-86 on (Challenger, kindergarten on up, our family vacation to TX, our first PC--running DOS 2.1), and now I'm thinking that people born then can now legally drive.
int main(void)
{
while (1)
printf("\t\t\b\b\b\b\b\b");
return 0;
}
It still doesn't do anything, though. I compiled/ran it using Cygwin and gcc, and it certainly didn't crash my machine; I just closed the bash session that I was running it in and everything was fine.
Umm, easy access cases were available for PC's long before Apple ever incorporated them. I remember buying a case for a 486DX-33 that had a hinged door built into the side.
Really? Apple has incorporated them since 1987, with the Mac II. With the exception of the early compact Macs, I can have most modular Macs completely disassembled in about 5 minutes, including my 7600 and LC II, without removing any screws.. My friend's dual-800 G4 is also incredibly easy to use; just open the hinged door and voilà, immediate access to everything. I have NEVER seen a PC that has a case that well-designed.
LPT and USB ports are extremely useful, easy to use and have been around on PC's before FireWire was on Macs.
Well, Macs have always had serial ports, which work much like parallel ports, and while it is true that you could get USB on a PC before the iMac, there was nothing to plug into it, and Windows 95 OSR2's support was awful.
Windows ME comes with MicroSoft Works, which IMHO is a pretty full featured productivity suite.
It does? Microsoft's website doesn't say that it does. But, even if it does, does it compare to AppleWorks, which many of my Mac-using friends use in lieu of MS Office, which they can pirate with ease?
Maybe your PC did come with both a DVD-R/CD-RW combo drive. I would venture to guess that it didnt before January 2001, when Apple made it standard on certain G4s. It took Apple to get a lot of units out in the field and drive down prices by volume (when the G4 with SuperDrive came out, the going price for a DVD-R/CD-RW drive was more than the whole G4 with SuperDrive sold for).
Yes, CRTs are still being used by Apple. And you can still use a CRT (with a standard HD15 connector) with a Mac. But who do you think will increase demand and market acceptance, and further R&D, on LCDs? The same manufacturer that brought USB, FireWire, DVD-R, and the GUI to the masses (yes, they didnt invent these technologies, but they were the first to really use them in a commercial setting, and in many ways, their implementations are still the best).
Im not a Mac zealot by any means; I dont even use a Mac as my primary computer. But I am glad that there is still one manufacturer that innovates as opposed to slapping together a bunch of no-name Taiwanese components and calling it an integrated system.
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$666.66 is also, coincidentally, the price for the very first Apple I computer, in 1976.
My P3/550 with 512MB RAM from early 2000 (fair enough, it only came with 128MB) had no problems running Windows XP. Just turn off all visual effects, don't install things you don't need, and make sure it stays spyware-free and it made a decent web browsing machine (I gave it to my roommate in early 2005 and he used it until summer 2006).
The Macs got color in 1987, with the advent of the Mac II. The Mac OS didn't take full advantage of color (displaying windows, backgrounds, etc) until System 7, though. For the record, System 7 was released in May 1991, and Windows 3.0 came out in May 1990.
No, both neutrons and neutrinos carry no charge, but they're different particles--neutrons are baryons (made from three quarks), whereas neutrinos are leptons.
I bought one of those used in mid-1999 from a salvage yard for $350. The manufacturing date is February 1996, and it works perfectly (except for an ever-so-slight discoloration in the lower right corner). HIGHLY recommended, it's been on for a large chunk of the past 4 years and still works like a dream (and they're probably really cheap these days).
I don't think Dennis needs a reason to laugh at anyone--he'll find it (his irreverence is refreshing, although he behaves himself when Jill's in the control room). I don't know when she got one--last November, maybe? It is in one of those server-style cases, two CPUs, and two 20" monitors. It's very nice, even though I have yet to use it.
You know the whole backup thing at the 90 inch only works if you remember to bring tapes up with you (which I forget on a regular basis but you know I'm a closet blonde). I just sftp my data back to multiple computers back at Steward to take care of the problem :0 The KPNO system is very nice- the Save the Bits archive makes multiple tapes of the data that get stored in the 4 meter and down in town and data gets ftp'd down to one of the NOAO Tucson servers as well. So it's on hard drive in multiple places as well as on tape in multiple places as well. As to Stromlo- somebody brought down all the backup tapes to Canberra on Friday (the day before the fire) so most of the data was saved. Unfortunately though a lot of us astro people are going to suffer in the near future when DAT drives stop being the best way to store our data. . .hell I have a desk drawer of DAT and DLT tapes as well as CD ROMs with data right now!
Heh, as an added bonus, Dennis will laugh at you if you forget the tapes. Of course, I just scp it to Jill's new gargantuan Linux box, my workstation at Steward, and my home computer, so that there's practically no danger of something bad happening to all copies (since the data directory on bokobs gets wiped at the end of each observing run). I've never used the 4 meter, but its method of data-saving does sound quite nice.
Oh, and I just back up everything to CD-R these days. Much more cost-effective than a tape drive for as little as I go observing.
Speaking as an astronomy student (who has been on several observing runs), SOP at Kitt Peak is to collect all the data from each run over the course of several nights, store it on the computer that controls the CCD (a SparcStation 5 at the Bok 90", in case you were wondering) and then when the run is over, the data is 1) scp'ed back to our main system at the university, and 2) backed up on tape (actually, this is done nightly). Hence, if we had a fire at Kitt Peak or Mt. Lemmon or some other nearby observatory, all the data would be safe (replacing the CCDs would be really freaking expensive, though).
Astronomers know all too well the value of a good backup--besides, the computers at the observatory itself are too busy/slow to do data reduction, necessitating the existence of off-site copies.
I basically agree with you, but I'm not sure there's anything wrong with American passenger sedans from a safety perspective. Many people, especially on the west coast, think American cars are ugly or poorly made, but I don't think it is fair to say that they suffer from a true saftey problem.
There's nothing wrong with American passenger sedans from a safety perspective (generally speaking), but Japanese/European passenger sedans are usually the highest-scoring cars in crash tests. Also, there tend to be fewer safety fiascos like the Ford Focus and Ford Explorer from Japanese and European manufacturers. When I said "don't endanger other drivers/passengers", I meant relative to large SUVs, not American cars (I think a Toyota Sequoia endangers other drivers as much as, say, a GMC Yukon). Sorry for any confusion.
Better yet, it might be wise to bring back the days when cars were built almost entirely out of steel, not out of plastic and sheet metal like they are today. Those old cars could withstand collisions with just about anything short of a tractor/trailer (lorry for you Brits), and sometimes even then. You could actually walk away from a 20mph crash, instead of having to call for an ambulance.
Sorry, but that's a common fallacy. See, when you have a collision between two objects, the kinetic energy has to be dissipated somewhere. In older cars, the body/chassis of the car didn't deform, which meant that the kinetic energy was (in many cases) transferred to the people inside. Modern cars crumple on impact so the people inside don't. Hence, if you were in a car from 1960, the car would have a dent while the people would be gravely injured, while the same accident in a 2000 -model car would probably total the car, but the occupants could walk away.
If you can make a new car as crash-resistant as an old one, without using steel, that'll be great. If not... well, I care more about my safety than I do about miles per gallon. I agree that most people don't need gas guzzlers such as SUV's, but the sacrifice of auto safety on the altar of the environment has been going on for way too long.
SUVs are not safer for the driver/occupants, and significantly more dangerous for other people on the road. Hence, each large SUV bought is a net decrease in total road safety, as well as fuel economy. If everyone drove Japanese/European passenger sedans, the roads would be significantly safer than they are now, since those cars routinely score the highest on IIHTS/NHTSA crash tests and don't endanger other drivers/passengers.
Oh god no, you don't want just Liboff to learn QM with. That is, unless your lecturer is really good--ours is decent, but the class is at 8 AM so it's a moot point--I'm currently in Quantum Theory II, the highest undergrad QM class at U of Arizona, and the text is Liboff. I, and several others, bought Griffiths on our own to get a good general understanding of what's going on, and then refer back to Liboff to look for the quantitative bits that are absent from Liboff.
All are better than Goswami, though.
BTW, with reference to this article, if you know math up through differential equations and want to learn about QM, I highly recommend Griffiths' book. It's not a reference text like Liboff, but it contains more than enough math so that it's not handwavy.
It seems that third-world nations, which don't have the option of pouring money down a never-ending sink hole, understand what so many organizations (such as the US military) don't: that free software, in addition to having zero license costs, also has a much lower TCO due to its ability to scale up/down to fit the available hardware, and the ease of management (update all the school's machines? not a problem with rsync, for example)
The only problem is, India's IT sector seems permanently wedded to Microsoft. However, if the new generation can grow up exposed to BSD and Linux and understand that MS isn't always the best option, then maybe some much-needed competition on the desktop will finally develop on a global scale.
Um, no.
We didn't sell battleships to the British for $1 each, we traded old, decrepit destroyers to them in exchange for leases on some of their North Atlantic military bases (which we still control).
The Russians won the Eastern front for many reasons, not least of which was the newly-developed industrial complex that Stalin built east of the Urals in the '30s, the brilliance of people like Zhukov, and the bravery and courage of the Soviet citizens, who didn't surrender Leningrad or Moscow, and resisted fiercely in occupied territory. Sure, our supplies and money helped, but Russia really made the difference in the European theater.
Actually, I read on Apple's site in their system profiles (couldn't find the link, which is why I pointed to lowendmac.com) that 9 is supported on it. And, having a friend with an old 7100, I can attest that it will run OS 9 without a problem (eg you don't have to play tricks with the installer to get it to work, like you would with 9.2.x on the same machine, or OS X on a 7300-9600, or Born Again/OS 8 on an '030).
2 245. Note the "Mac OS Supported" column. So I guess we were both wrong: Apple supports > OS 8.6 but 9.1.
Oh, and here's the website in question: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=11
wrong.
Actually they did resurrect the SE/30 in the form of the Classic II. (The Mac Classic was about SE speed IIRC).
No, the Classic II was pretty much a bottom-of-the-line LC II in a Classic case, and a poor replacement for the SE/30 (no expansion slots, 10 MB RAM ceiling as opposed to 128MB for the SE/30, and a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit data bus), although it was significantly cheaper. A resurrected SE/30 at the time would have been a Quadra 700 in a Classic case, which would have been a kick-ass machine back in October 1991..
in that "Hackers" book by Stephen Levy .. but i dont remember the exact idea ... something in San Francisco and a terminal in the wall -- maybe someone else could elaborate
Lee Felsenstein and his "Community Memory" project in the late '60s and early '70s. He wanted to start a non-profit to install a public-access computer with terminals, so that everybody could have access to a computer. His idea was rendered obsolete by Steven Wozniak and Ed Roberts, and their personal computers.
Well, the FreeBSD 4.4 CD installs XFree 3.3.6 by default, so probably not :/
XFree86 4.0.3 is included on that CD (you have to install it manually), but 4.1.0 (and soon, 4.2.0) is easily had via the ports tree.
The more I use GNU software, the less I like it.
/usr/ports/editors/emacs; make install')
Well, the BSDs don't ship with very much GNU software at all (although you'll still have to use GCC). As a bonus, updating it is trivial using the ports tree and cvsup, which are included with all the BSDs (except Darwin/Mac OS X, which uses fink, which works kind of like Debian's apt).
I despise info. give me man.
All the BSDs have excellent man pages, and FreeBSD has a top-notch handbook. As an example, try 'man firstboot' to find out what to do after you boot the system for the first time.
I don't want no emacs, give me vi or give me death.
The BSDs ship with the 'real' vi, not vim, and don't install emacs by default. You have to install it yourself (although that's easy--an emacs package ships on the FreeBSD install CD, or 'cd
The fact that they feel the need to put GNU in the name of the distribution tells me tha they are too ideologically pure to do the best thing for the users.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin. No GNU there.
Of course, many commercial Unices (and OS X) have these features too, but sadly none of them (except for Slowaris^WSolaris) run on the x86 box you probably use.
The major downside to the BSDs is (x86) hardware support, although if you've been using Linux for more than a couple of years, it's nothing you're not used to.
I agree. I've been using Linux and FreeBSD since 1995, and just recently bought a Mac. OS X is, quite simply, fabulous (despite the interface issues, which I expect will get ironed out soon enough).
/. about how Macs do not appeal to geeks, but I think they might. How many Linux/Unix coder geeks really care about Photoshop and computer graphics (besides rendering?) Judging from what I've seen of KDE/GNOME splash screens (with the exception of Ximian), I'd say not very many. There are some of us out there who want access to a command line and a top-notch development environment, but also might want to create movies and modify images without learning Photoshop (or GIMP) or Premiere, or spending the money on these applications. That's really the appeal of the (new) Mac experience to many geeks: top-notch consumer OS, with the Unix functionality built-in.
I've heard a lot on
In fact, here in the Physics department, I've watched a fair amount of people switch from Sun/SGI to Linux, or Mac OS X (and even some from Linux to OS X), because it runs their applications, is cheaper than new SGIs/Suns, and just works right away, unlike (sorry) Linux.
It'd be pretty cool if they could release (eventually) a version for PowerPC with some OS X binary compatibility, so those of us with older Power Macs (such as my 7600) that can't run OS X very well, or at all, could install this and have at least some OS X-ish functionality (I don't see why this couldn't be reasonably possible, since Lesstif and WINE have some degree of binary compatibility with Motif and Win32, respectively, and it should be quite a bit easier to implement GNUStep/Cocoa binary compatibility than Win32/WINE compatibility). Also, they wouldn't have to worry about hardware compatibility issues, since it'd be running natively on PowerPC.
This matters why? I mean, sure, they have to update the textbooks, but why is this worth researching, let alone newsworthy? Can this problem help us solve other problems that need to be solved?
Any astrophysicists mind?
Well, as a budding astrophysicist (undergrad physics/astronomy major at UofA), planetary/stellar evolution is quite an important area of research (in fact, a whole branch of astronomy focuses on this. It's even a separate degree program at some schools--planetary science). Also, forgetting to account for the radiation of energy and the resultant decrease in mass seems to be a fairly major oversight, in violation of some of the most basic concepts of orbital motion, such as the fact that the downward force due to gravity (and, hence, responsible for the behavior of orbits) is proportional to the mass of the central object and inversely proportional to the radius squared. Decrease the mass, and the force decreases, resulting in a change in the dynamics of Earth's movement, and increasing the perihelion and aphelion.
This is worth researching because Earth and its fate is somewhat important to us, for reasons that should be obvious. This will help us model the evolution of the solar system up to the white-dwarf stage, one which will be reached by most main-sequence stars (we think).
Is it only me who has a hard time imagining people born in the 80's being able to walk and talk? Imagine that there are people using computers today who weren't even around when the C-64 was introduced! Heck, a person born at the same time as the Amiga was born would be 17 years old today!! Damn, I feel old.
Well, I was born in 1980 and I have a hard time imagining people born much later than me walking/talking/driving/etc. I have a lot of memories from 1985-86 on (Challenger, kindergarten on up, our family vacation to TX, our first PC--running DOS 2.1), and now I'm thinking that people born then can now legally drive.
Well, your code's wrong: the correct version is:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
while (1)
printf("\t\t\b\b\b\b\b\b");
return 0;
}
It still doesn't do anything, though. I compiled/ran it using Cygwin and gcc, and it certainly didn't crash my machine; I just closed the bash session that I was running it in and everything was fine.
Do you have to be using Visual C++ or something?
Umm, easy access cases were available for PC's long before Apple ever incorporated them. I remember buying a case for a 486DX-33 that had a hinged door built into the side.
Really? Apple has incorporated them since 1987, with the Mac II. With the exception of the early compact Macs, I can have most modular Macs completely disassembled in about 5 minutes, including my 7600 and LC II, without removing any screws.. My friend's dual-800 G4 is also incredibly easy to use; just open the hinged door and voilà, immediate access to everything. I have NEVER seen a PC that has a case that well-designed.
LPT and USB ports are extremely useful, easy to use and have been around on PC's before FireWire was on Macs.
Well, Macs have always had serial ports, which work much like parallel ports, and while it is true that you could get USB on a PC before the iMac, there was nothing to plug into it, and Windows 95 OSR2's support was awful.
Windows ME comes with MicroSoft Works, which IMHO is a pretty full featured productivity suite.
It does? Microsoft's website doesn't say that it does. But, even if it does, does it compare to AppleWorks, which many of my Mac-using friends use in lieu of MS Office, which they can pirate with ease?
Maybe your PC did come with both a DVD-R/CD-RW combo drive. I would venture to guess that it didnt before January 2001, when Apple made it standard on certain G4s. It took Apple to get a lot of units out in the field and drive down prices by volume (when the G4 with SuperDrive came out, the going price for a DVD-R/CD-RW drive was more than the whole G4 with SuperDrive sold for).
Yes, CRTs are still being used by Apple. And you can still use a CRT (with a standard HD15 connector) with a Mac. But who do you think will increase demand and market acceptance, and further R&D, on LCDs? The same manufacturer that brought USB, FireWire, DVD-R, and the GUI to the masses (yes, they didnt invent these technologies, but they were the first to really use them in a commercial setting, and in many ways, their implementations are still the best).
Im not a Mac zealot by any means; I dont even use a Mac as my primary computer. But I am glad that there is still one manufacturer that innovates as opposed to slapping together a bunch of no-name Taiwanese components and calling it an integrated system.