It's easy to see how you could come to this conclusion, especially considering that the Acer has a built-in camera like the iSight built into the MacBook Pro... (Yes, I looked up the Acer for comparison, and was surprised at the inclusion of a camera.)
But... these machines actually do differ substantially, both in specs and in the case. For one thing, Acer is using carbon fiber composite, and Apple is not; the iSight mount looks different from the Acer's camera mount, as does the latch mechanism for the lid. So, sorry, they are not the same laptop. Apple did not rebadge an Acer laptop.
The Acer boasts 2 GB RAM; the Apple offerings are expandable up to 2 GB, but come standard with either 512 or 1 GB of RAM, depending on the model. So that's another difference in Acer's favor. The ports are laid out totally differently. The Acer does not appear to have FireWire, while the MacBook Pro has FireWire 400. I think the Acer boasts a 2 GHz dual-core processor, while the MacBook Pro's CPU speeds are 1.67 and 1.83 GHz (depending on model).
Personally, I'll take the superior OS and the Apple build quality over the Acer offering any day.
If you had been bothered to actually do some research and check your facts, you might have saved yourself some embarrassment.
Professional musicians and DV camera users (i.e., users of pretty much any worthwhile camcorder, consumer or professional) will need FireWire still. So I don't think we'll see FireWire 400 disappear any time soon. But I fear its days are numbered, especially if the consumer electronics industry decides to kill FireWire in the few niche areas it's still viable. The pro and prosumer segments may keep it alive even then.
It's worth noting that FireWire 400 is present and accounted for on the MacBook Pro, so no need for USB->FireWire dongle adapters. Yet.
In the case of the iPod, it makes sense to focus on a single interface that is a "least common denominator" among users -- and while many PCs lack IEEE 1394 ports, all modern PCs have USB 2.0, and all modern Macs have USB 2.0 as well. So eliminating FireWire support from the iPod is a great cost-saving measure that increases Apple's profit margin and streamlines the product design moving forward.
I noticed the lack of FireWire 800 as well. But they kept FireWire 400 -- so at least DV users and professional musicians aren't left out in the cold! But this trend does worry me. Perhaps Apple did a study and found that almost nobody used the FW800 ports, only the FW400 ports? Of course, a single FW400 port isn't so great either, but at least you can daisy-chain FireWire devices.
It's amusing this guy got modded as a Troll, considering the tagline inside the quotation marks is quoted directly from Apple's home page (updated mere minutes ago for this reader).
"What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A lot more than it's ever done in a PC"
Pretty inflammatory marketing tagline. I wonder if Apple cleared that with Intel?
This argument is interesting, but I am having trouble following the math. Granted, I wasn't as good at statistical mechanics as I could have been when I was a physics undergrad, but one of the mathematical substitutions in the article doesn't make sense to me. If Nbar is defined as the average number of ancestor-simulations run by a posthuman civilization, and if f_I is the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations (or that contain at least some individuals who are interested in that and have sufficient resources to run a significant number of such simulations), and if Nbar_I is the average number of ancestor-simulations run by such interested civilizations, the author of the paper you're citing concludes that:
Nbar = f_I * Nbar_I
This doesn't seem to make sense. To me, it makes more sense to write:
Nbar_I = f_I * Nbar
Am I just not understanding the math, or am I taking crazy pills, or what?
Even following the links provided by the poster and visiting MS newsgroups, out of the posts, it looks like there are maybe 100 people at the most that have encountered a problem...
That you know of. Not everyone who experiences problems is going to report about them online; many Xbox 360 early adopters are not as technically savvy as you might believe, and even if they were, not every single person is inclined to rant about problems they might have encountered.
We can't know for sure what the report rate is for problems. Of those who have reported problems to the manufacturer or to the retailer, how many also bothered to report problems in a public forum?
I would guesstimate that maybe 10% of people who actually had Xbox 360 problems talked about them publicly. So if maybe 100 people (to use your guesstimate) reported problems in online forums, then maybe about 1000 people actually are having problems. That still might not seem like a lot, but the number of units sold thus far is low, so the percentage is probably pretty high. Microsoft's target is to sell 3 million units by the end of the year, and I don't think they've shipped even 2 million yet.
On the other hand, this is the initial production run. I'm sure some kinks will get worked out as the process is streamlined and better QA is put where needed.
Out of the 'how many units', and this is the number of problems experienced to warrant a SlahDot trash thread?
The number of units sold thus far isn't that high. For so many reports to come out so quickly after the launch of the console, one has to wonder. You can't assume every single person griping is a Microsoft hater. (And if someone truly hated Microsoft, why would they buy an Xbox 360?)
As a side note, my spouse works in the retail gaming industry, and they have had very little [sic] reported problems in comparison to the units they have sold.
That's one (anecdotal) data point... which is insufficient evidence to draw any conclusions from. Let's see what the picture is like when the market is saturated. Right now, demand far outstrips supply.
For example, PS2s sold last week generate more customer calls and returns for errors and crashing on a percentange then they are seeing with the 360.
Yes, but the PS2 has gone through several major hardware updates, has a larger installed base, and still sells more units. Not to mention that the PS2s that are failing have probably been in service for longer than a couple weeks (which is about how long the Xbox 360 has been out, as of this writing). Of course the percentages are going to be higher.
I wonder how many Xbox 360s that are currently in use are going to fail after one month, or one year? We don't know this yet.
[...] you would think Sony would have the PS2 hardware problem worked out.
No denying that Sony has its share of quality issues with the PS2. My original PS2 bit the dust after maybe 2 years of service; the laser seemed to be a common point of failure for early units. Each successive generation was an improvement in some way, but Sony's main drive was to reduce production cost, not to improve build quality. So while some issues have been fixed, newer issues have cropped up to replace old ones. I can only imagine the engineering compromises needed to make the new "slimline" PS2.
Still, just because Sony's product has issues doesn't give an excuse to Microsoft. "Hey, we may have some problems, but we're better than those guys!"
Get off your we hate everything MS does and think for yourself.
No doubt that the Slashdot crowd on the whole dislikes Microsoft, but people have high expectations for Microsoft products, especially considering what they cost. Consider also that the Xbox 360 is an "appliance" type device, as it's sold as a gam
When has Microsoft EVER leveraged a patent to stifle progress?
Actually, according to this site, they've done it at least once, and they've engaged in some other tactics to discourage competition using patents as bludgeons or bargaining chips.
Here's a direct quote from the site I linked above:
In 2003/04 Microsoft published patent license terms for CIFS which disallow the use ore [sic] reimplementation of this communication architecture by GNU software. In late 2002, Microsoft began dissuade corproporate customers from introducing GNU/Linux by pointing out that if they use free software nobody would protect them from being sued for patent infringement.
The implication is that SAMBA is on legally dubious footing. This also explains why current SAMBA development is at a glacial pace -- its developers need to reverse engineer a good chunk of Microsoft's networking code. That would be needed anyway, since Microsoft's own implementation is idiosyncratic and does not exactly conform to their own published specification.
I even further enjoy the condescending and racist responses it invoked.
Condescending, yes. Racist? You're absolutely full of sh*t. Having a low tolerance for bad logic and bad grammar doesn't make me a racist. It makes me an elitist. Get it right, douchebag.
...as some sort of defining predication of my assessment of Dvorak and also traversing it to my understanding of the fundamentals of English in general.
If you can't be trusted to understand what someone is saying, you can't be trusted to evaluate what they are saying. I stand by what I wrote, though my suggestion that you weren't a native English speaker was meant mostly tongue-in-cheek -- I suspected you were just a poorly educated jerk who probably skated by on talents that had nothing to do with language skills.
Writing something at 3AM buys you some sympathy points for bad grammar, but it doesn't excuse you from holes in your reasoning.
Your response is enough of a black eye of personal reflection on yourself that I really don't need to even address this issue further.
But you're going to anyway, aren't you? I still know I'm right, and nothing you say is going to convince me otherwise. If my manner of expressing myself bothers you, tough. The message and the messenger are not the same thing, and even if you despise the messenger, the message is still valid.
You also haven't offered any counter-examples as "proof" of your point of view. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I can't possibly see how you "won" anything, except the right to claim moral superiority. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I have however passed your post around the office; it has made for entertainment for our developers and contributing authors. You see, I actually work in the industry that this post is in reference to, and my assessment of Dvorak is shared throughout the industry.
Ah, scratch what I wrote about moral supriority.:-) You're just a d*ck.
What office is this? What developers? What authors? It's easy enough to throw around the implication that you work for a publication, or that you work for a company that does some form of software development. What industry, exactly, are you talking about? The games industry? The "computer" industry? IT is pretty big, so that could mean anything. You could be a big fish or a little fish...
But you know what? I don't give a rat's ass. If I ever met you in person, I'd have some choice words for you.
I love how you purport to speak for the entire industry, whatever industry it is that you claim to be a part of. Well, buddy, I'm a developer too, and I have a few major projects under my belt. Chances are we run in similar circles -- assuming, of course, that you're not lying. I don't share your opinion, and I'll bet a lot of other people in my line of work don't share your opinion either. I know of several close personal friends in IT who think you're full of it. What, the flurry of comments taking you to task over Dvorak being a "Mac proponent" wasn't enough of a clue?
Now take your racist remarks and crawl back into the cave from which you escaped.
Well, despite the fact that there's no scientific consensus on what, if anything, the word "race" means, I know damn well what a racist is. Having contempt for those who lack proper communication skills, and who then seek to "school" others, doesn't make me a racist. It makes me an elitist. The fact that you have indirectly refuted my claim that you're not a native English speaker only means that you've taken away what tiny excuse you might have had for being woefully misinformed.
For others reading these posts that seek truth for themselves instead of hand selected posts, just do a Google search for yourself on Dvorak. I stand by my statements.
According to the article, "...Microsoft felt it unnecessary to patch a flaw six months ago that was originally low risk but mutated in to something extremely dangerous." This is, presumably, in reference to the JavaScript exploit that was recently covered on Slashdot and in an Eweek article.
The thing is, this flaw didn't "mutate" -- it's just that we didn't until recently understand how dangerous this security flaw really is. That there's already a working proof of concept is alarming.
It's quite inaccurate to say that the flaw "mutated" when in reality it never changed -- only our understanding of it changed. Who's to say that someone, somewhere, wasn't already aware of the true potential for abuse when the flaw was first discovered half a year ago? Microsoft didn't make fixing this a high priority because they were lulled into the belief (along with almost everyone else, apparently) that this was a simple DoS exploit instead of the own-the-machine exploit it turned out to be. (Yeah, it takes a lot more work to actually gain control of the machine, but the same fundamental mechanism is used.)
I took a gander at that RFC you linked to, and it's actually a joke page. I'm surprised the IETF would host a gag like this! (I probably shouldn't be...)
I had thought, however, that there were some real documents out there detailing the use of IP for interplanetary communication.
I mean, it's fun to talk about IP addressability down to individual atoms, but where's the meat-and-potatoes? Doing a Google search on "IP interplanetary" yields all kinds of tantalizing results, with some actual discussions out there on the problems. (For example, TCP won't work with long latencies, but IP itself and protocols layered on it like UDP are latency-insensitive.)
I hadn't tried this in Firefox 1.5, but in 1.0.7, Firefox became unresponsive for a couple minutes, opening a couple new windows (which might have been dialogs, but with a lot of gobbledygook in them)... and eventually I regained control of Firefox (after about 5 minutes) with no need to kill the app.
So, a relatively brief hang, not an actual crash, would seem more likely. If you're impatient, I suppose you might think the app "crashed," but it's a recoverable state.
I didn't post links to the articles I alluded to because someone elsewhere in this thread had already done that for me. In case you'd forgotten, posting redundant information is frowned on by the moderators on Slashdot (even if duplicate articles get submitted and approved with lamentable frequency). That's why there's a "Redundant" moderation.
People in the "Mac" world don't like him because he wrote articles that first dropped the rumors of "OSX on Intel" and other things Mac users didn't want to hear and called him crazy over. He has been blunt about Apple, but is STILL a Apple and OSX 'proponent', very much so...
This is nonsense. Clearly, you are not a native English speaker; if it weren't clear previously, this post has confirmed it. You clearly have poor English comprehension skills, and it shows.
John Dvorak is a pundit. His job is to make predictions. Just because he got one or two of his crazy predictions right doesn't mean anything; most of his predictions were ridiculous because they didn't even seem plausible, but statistically, he was bound to get one or two predictions right. The "prediction" that OS X was moving to Intel is hardly something I'd give Dvorak credit for -- especially when you consider that it was a well known fact among technically-versed Mac users that Apple had been maintaining an x86 port of their next generation OS since the Rhapsody days (i.e., before it was named Mac OS X and marketed as such).
People weren't slamming Dvorak's "predictions" because they "didn't want to hear" them; they slammed his predictions because most of them were laughable, and there were usually many reasons -- reasons of logic, reasons of practicality, technical reasons, etc. -- why most of Dvorak's predictions would never come to pass. For the vast majority of Dvorak's predictions, there still are good reasons to disbelieve them.
Want me to post the links you won't, cause even in the articles where he challenges Apple, he usually gives them more credit than they deserve?
Don't worry, I'll be providing about a dozen links and quotes just to prove what a dolt you are. Not that this would matter, since you won't interpret the articles the same way a (sane) native English speaker would.
Besides, since when does giving Apple more credit than they deserve equate to writing a puff piece about Apple? You can still savagely and unfairly criticize Apple and write a scathingly negative article about Apple or the Mac, and still give Apple more credit than it deserves in the same article. It's happened before, and this is a common tactic that poison-pen authors use to defend themselves against accusations of bias. "Well, if I'm so anti-Apple, how come I said some nice things about Apple in this recent article?" Yet when you read the article the author references, it's stingingly anti-Apple with only one or two positive comments thrown in to give the appearance of balance.
So, let's get busy with some links to John Dvorak articles where he clearly shows anti-Apple or anti-Mac bias. (Apologies since some of these links have been posted elsewhere.)
Media Bias and Technology Reporting (published October, 2005) This was also referenced in a MacDailyNews article. Dvorak laughably claims that the media is biased against Microsoft and in favor of Apple. If that's so, why the never-ending stream of "Apple is dying" articles in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere up to and even for a year or so after Steve Jobs returned to Apple? Or is Dvorak claiming that the press suddenly warmed up to Apple in the last few years because it's fashionable? It seems to me that the press is, by and large, a fa
I can guarantee that it will not sync with the video ipod in a useful way (ie transcode TV shows to ipod's low res format)
This is actually two major assumptions; one, that syncing recorded shows from the DVR onto the video iPod won't actually happen; and two, that synchronization will only go one way.
What about video content that is purchased through the iTunes Music Store and legally resides on the iPod? If you sync your iPod primarily on a desktop computer (Mac or PC) and then carry your iPod to the living room and plug it into the dock on top of the DVR, shouldn't you expect to view the programs you paid for? They needn't even be copied from the iPod's hard drive to the DVR's; they can be viewed in place, similar to how the Xbox 360 allows you to play music from a plugged-in iPod.
Then again, a home network would obviate the need to do even this much.
I doubt this thing will be fast enough to transcode a TV show in a timeframe deemed acceptable to Apple's high QA standards.
If Apple uses a dual-core Yonah (or whatever the Intel code-name is for the dual-core Pentium M derivative that Apple will be using) or any of Intel's beefier dual-core offerings, I think the transcoding could be done very quickly and efficiently -- especially for SD (standard definition) offerings. HD is another story, but then again, would you really want to cram HD content onto your video iPod?
IBM's PPC970 is known to produce vast quantities of heat, particularly with three cores. And ATI's modern GPUs are hot potatoes as well - particularly when you consider that the ATI GPU in the XBOX is also serving as the northbridge.
OK, for the umpteenth time, say it with me now: The Xbox 360 CPU, code named Xenon, is not a PPC970. It is a custom triple-core processor that shares little in common with the PPC970 except an instruction set. The architecture is completely different.
For an excellent overview of the Xenon, please see ArsTechnica's article. Each core on the Xenon has a different number of execution units from the PPC970 core, and the pipelines are deeper in the Xenon to accommodate higher clock speeds. The Xenon also lacks out-of-order execution, which is a key feature in the PPC970.
I'm just surprised that no one was smart enough to put a bloody Sempron in one of these consoles...
The Sempron is an IA32 processor (x86 instruction set; not sure if the Sempron includes x86-64 instructions or not, or which versions). Microsoft made a clear decision to abandon x86 processors in favor of PowerPC for their gaming consoles. PowerPC chips can be made very energy efficient -- just look at the latest G4 processors from Freescale -- but for high performance and high clock speeds, power consumption needs to increase too.
Not sure if this is confirmed to be related to the orientation of the console (vertical vs. horizontal), but I know of several local gamers who are having problems with scratched game discs. My coworker stopped by one of the local gaming stores this weekend and ran into an irate gamer who showed an actual disc that was scratched -- it's bad, too. A perfect circle gets carved into the surface of the game disc.
Anyone running into this issue with the Xbox 360 should try laying the console flat instead of standing it on its end (the way most ads depict the system). Not sure if that will actually help, but it can't hurt at this point.
Considering that many of the games retail for $60 a pop, I'm amazed people are actually running out and buying replacements when this disc scratching issue comes up.
Cue the usual litany of "Where are my mod points when I need them?"
I'm not sure what's scarier -- that TheNetAvenger was modded +4 Informative for stating that John Dvorak has been a Mac advocate for the last 15 years, or that the people who called TheNetAvenger on this have less positive moderation on their comments.
I don't think it's any secret that John Dvorak has turned on Apple, and the last decade has seen an almost unending parade of negative articles by Dvorak regarding Apple and the Mac platform. He's predicted the demise of Apple more times than I can count, and he's made some very unflattering comments about most of Apple's products that have gone on to do very well in the market. (Dvorak was, in fact, the first person I can recall comparing the iBook to a toilet seat, no doubt informing Apple's decision to make the 2001 iBook a more conventional looking laptop.)
I haven't personally seen or read anything pro-Mac or pro-Apple coming from Dvorak since my college days -- and I graduated in 1992. Almost every time a Dvorak article is linked in Slashdot, you will see a flurry of comments posted slamming Dvorak for his anti-Mac bias -- even if the article in question isn't all that biased or anti-anything. That's how much good will Dvorak has burned with the Mac community and with Apple.
I won't bother providing URLs to back up my arguments, as other commenters in this thread have already done the leg-work for me. Instead, I'm going to plead with moderators: won't you please think of the children?
In the state of Arizona, you're automatically at fault if you rear-end someone. It's possible to argue your way out of the ticket in traffic court if you can prove that the person in front of you performed an illegal lane change or some other unsafe maneuver (i.e., cut you off) prior to the accident. That's hard to prove without witnesses.
The way the law is written has a lot to do with it; in Arizona, it's "failure to control your speed in order to avoid a collision." The idea being, if you are following behind someone in traffic, you are required to maintain a safe following distance and a proper speed; if the guy in front of you slams on his brakes, you must be able to stop without hitting him.
I am not a lawyer (usual disclaimers apply), but I've been on both ends of this equation in Arizona. This little bit of law snags more unwary California visitors than almost anything else; as another poster in this thread commented, California law is a little less cut-and-dried, since the person in front can be faulted for "brake checking."
As a side note, I really had trouble figuring out what you were trying to say; the GP poster was expressing himself pretty clearly, but I had a hard time deciding which side of the fence you were coming down on. But I can assure you that if you are in Arizona and you rear-end someone, you will be ticketed, regardless. Cops here aren't even given discretion in the matter. (Side-swipes and other collisions that are not strictly front-to-back are another thing entirely...) Not sure if any other state is quite so absolute, but it's one data point to disprove your final assertion.
fixes for security should be free because they basically sold you something that didn't work otherwise
But if you read the boilerplate in the license agreement, they disclaim any warranty of reliability or fitness for purpose. Basically, they license you the right to run the software, but if it doesn't work (or doesn't work the way you expect it to), they're not liable.
I'm sure putting that boilerplate to the test in a court might create problems for Microsoft, not to mention the PR backlash they'd get... Besides which, some states (such as Arizona) have laws that supersede such boilerplate language.
I find myself agreeing with Dvorak. This is a conflict of interest for Microsoft, antitrust issues aside. I'm sure that Symantec or McAfee could always play the antitrust angle if they felt threatened.
If you read any official Microsoft documentation regarding the administrator account, they recommend that users do not log on to a workstation with the administrator account as their regular user account.
If that's the case, why does Windows XP Home Edition default to making the user's primary account an administrative account -- one which requires no password unless you tell it explicitly to require one?
In many corporate IT organizations, it's become commonplace to grant administrative privileges to a user for their local machine; they still can't use those privileges network-wide, but it gives them enough ammo to shoot themselves in the foot. It's just more practical (in the eyes of IT staffers, anyway, if not in reality) to do that, rather than have an administrative account and password that's global which everyone knows. This has the added advantage of creating an audit trail so that when a user installs some unauthorized software on a workstation, it becomes pretty easy to tell who installed it.
Logging in with an unprivileged account and then running binaries piecemeal with administrative privileges sounds great in theory, until you have to run some ill-behaved software that assumes you're already logged in as an administrator. (This happens a lot at my workplace, but I can't really elaborate more than that.) The inconvenience and impracticality really has an effect on productivity.
I'm not saying that your suggestion (using "Run As...") won't work... just that in the real world, most people would chafe if they were forced to work like that. That, plus the ill-behaved 3rd party software issue I mentioned, really makes it not a very good practical idea.
yup. because everyone knows experts know everything about all programs and never make mistakes.
Thank you! Where are my moderator points when I need them? Someone should mod this guy up.
Seriously, it's astounding how some folks assume that if you're a self-proclaimed computer expert or power user, that you have to automatically know everything they think you should know. There are varying levels of expertise, and while I know Dvorak isn't in the Guru league, he's not entirely a dope.
Oddly enough, this article by Dvorak is one of the few where I find myself agreeing with (most of) what he says.
I'm pretty savvy about Windows security, enough so that I have managed to keep the one Windows 2000 system I run at home from getting any viruses or other malware, but even I was unaware that CuteFTP had a nasty security exploit like that.
Then again, I wouldn't get caught dead running CuteFTP -- tried it a long time ago, many versions back, and it never really worked right for me.
Sorry, buddy, but on this site the audience is pedantic, your writing skils [sic] lose it.
You tell 'em, Sparky!
Seriously, dude, what exactly did you just add to the discussion? My point is that there is pedantry, and there is stupid pedantry. My post was pretty well reasoned and argued from the point of someone who knows how to write (and who has an advanced degree in that arena -- not that most folks here seem to care or respect that). The person to whom I was responding clearly was trying to treat English like a computer language. Natural languages are perverse and have fine shades of meaning; words are not sharply delineated and clearly defined, unlike the keywords in synthetic computer languages. Arguing from a dictionary definition isn't acceptable in academic circles for this reason.
In case you missed it, I was being pedantic from a different point of view than the person to whom I was responding. This isn't a binary, "either-or" proposition. The difference is, my brand of pedantry was more germane than the other guy's. Get it?
So, again, what exactly was your point, Mr. Coward? That computer nerds can't be bothered communicating in natural languages as well as the rest of the human race? Well, I'm a computer nerd who doesn't fit that mold. I make good money writing code for a living (got an advanced degree for that, too -- not that anyone really cares), and writing prose and poetry for my own pleasure, but I'm not stupid enough to conflate the two.
Heh. You are making a complete and utter ass of yourself with your argument.
I think ifwm is right on the money. Hardly making an ass of himself!
In most "countries," a nation is referred to as a "state," not a "country." In the United States of America, calling our "states" by that name is a holdover from the fact that the original colonies had no real federal government to speak of - they were essentially all seperate [sic] nations.
Besides the obvious typo/spelling error above, you're quite wrong. India and Germany have "states" just like the US of A does. (I'm sure someone will bring up differences between "their" system and "ours," but the fact remains that the terms are the same, even if the organizational relationships might differ.)
It's pretty common in the modern world to refer to countries as "nation states" to avoid any confusion over the term "state." Contrary to your assertion, the sense of "state" which means "one of the more or less internally autonomous territorial and political units composing a federation under a sovereign government" does not derive from the notion that these territorial/political units were somehow once sovereign nation-states in their own right.
"Part of having a good vocabulary is knowing when to use it."
Incorrect. Part of being a good writer is knowing when to use your good vocabulary.
Well, aside from pedantically correcting someone else, you haven't really added much to the discussion. I think most reasonable English speakers and readers would understand the quote from the grandparent post to mean essentially what your corrected version means.
Having said that, I believe it's also true that having a good vocabulary means more than knowing the denotations (dictionary definitions) of a bunch of words; understanding connotations (implicit meanings, fine shades of meaning that distinguish otherwise synonymous words) is very important as well. Furthermore, someone with a good vocabulary should have a good grasp of when certain words are appropriate, whether those words are used in writing (scholarly or otherwise), or in speech.
As defined on dictionary.com: [...] I see nothing in there about "knowing when to use it."
Ah, yes. Recall I previously touched on the difference between denotation and connotation. To me, and other practitioners of the writing arts, the term "vocabulary" encompasses much more than what any dictionary could possibly relate. The definition you cite makes this plain as day; after all, the third sense listed, "A list of words and often phrases, usually arranged alphabetically and defined or translated..." is a sense best used for the words "dictionary" and "lexicon."
Is a vocabulary just a repository of words and their meanings? Only in the most shallow sense. When you say that someone has a good vocabulary, you're implying a lot more than that the person has an exceptionally large store of words and their meanings stuck in his head. "Good" in this sense means more than a relative measure of quantity. To me, and to my English and Literature teachers before me, having a "good vocabulary" means knowing when certain words are appropriate. Often, that stems from knowing the connotations that words have, and these fine shades of meaning are usually not reported in dictionaries (with the exception of collegiate dictionaries and the OED); this knowledge, in turn, often comes functionally, from a teacher and from writing experience. If you're lucky, you'll find expanded entries in e.g. the collegiate edition of Roget's Thesaurus which enumerate various synonyms and explain the subtle differences between them.
In closing, I might point out that citing a dictionary definition of a word is hardly a demonstration of cognitive skill, nor is it an unassailable or authoritative way to advance one's argument. As you may have no doubt noticed, different dictionaries can define the same words very differently, often due to editorial and philosophical differences between the publications and their staffs. That's why good teachers emphasize the use of primary sources -- and dictionaries don't qualify as primary sources.
My coworker has the Mazda 3 hatchback with automatic transmission, and he's getting approximately 30 miles per gallon. He also typically uses 89 octane fuel instead of the more widely used 87, and he claims it gives him a small performance boost; I reckon the higher octane fuel also gives him marginally better mileage than he'd otherwise have.
The USB car has a 3-"cylinder". Did they make a mistake -- how do you do 3 cylinder pistons? Or is this actually a rotary?
Not a rotary. An odd number of cylinders is easily doable with an inline configuration. Volvo S40 and S60 sedans have 5-cylinder inline engines, for instance. The pistons just need to be attached to the crankshaft at (360/n) degree intervals, where n is the number of pistons/cylinders.
Inline engines seem to do well up to about 6 cylinders. (My Volvo 960 has a 3 liter inline 6, for instance.) Odd numbers of cylinders are pretty rare, especially in North America, but there are still a few 3- and 5-cylinder car models out there.
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It's easy to see how you could come to this conclusion, especially considering that the Acer has a built-in camera like the iSight built into the MacBook Pro... (Yes, I looked up the Acer for comparison, and was surprised at the inclusion of a camera.)
But... these machines actually do differ substantially, both in specs and in the case. For one thing, Acer is using carbon fiber composite, and Apple is not; the iSight mount looks different from the Acer's camera mount, as does the latch mechanism for the lid. So, sorry, they are not the same laptop. Apple did not rebadge an Acer laptop.
The Acer boasts 2 GB RAM; the Apple offerings are expandable up to 2 GB, but come standard with either 512 or 1 GB of RAM, depending on the model. So that's another difference in Acer's favor. The ports are laid out totally differently. The Acer does not appear to have FireWire, while the MacBook Pro has FireWire 400. I think the Acer boasts a 2 GHz dual-core processor, while the MacBook Pro's CPU speeds are 1.67 and 1.83 GHz (depending on model).
Personally, I'll take the superior OS and the Apple build quality over the Acer offering any day.
If you had been bothered to actually do some research and check your facts, you might have saved yourself some embarrassment.
Professional musicians and DV camera users (i.e., users of pretty much any worthwhile camcorder, consumer or professional) will need FireWire still. So I don't think we'll see FireWire 400 disappear any time soon. But I fear its days are numbered, especially if the consumer electronics industry decides to kill FireWire in the few niche areas it's still viable. The pro and prosumer segments may keep it alive even then.
It's worth noting that FireWire 400 is present and accounted for on the MacBook Pro, so no need for USB->FireWire dongle adapters. Yet.
In the case of the iPod, it makes sense to focus on a single interface that is a "least common denominator" among users -- and while many PCs lack IEEE 1394 ports, all modern PCs have USB 2.0, and all modern Macs have USB 2.0 as well. So eliminating FireWire support from the iPod is a great cost-saving measure that increases Apple's profit margin and streamlines the product design moving forward.
I noticed the lack of FireWire 800 as well. But they kept FireWire 400 -- so at least DV users and professional musicians aren't left out in the cold! But this trend does worry me. Perhaps Apple did a study and found that almost nobody used the FW800 ports, only the FW400 ports? Of course, a single FW400 port isn't so great either, but at least you can daisy-chain FireWire devices.
Pretty inflammatory marketing tagline. I wonder if Apple cleared that with Intel?
This argument is interesting, but I am having trouble following the math. Granted, I wasn't as good at statistical mechanics as I could have been when I was a physics undergrad, but one of the mathematical substitutions in the article doesn't make sense to me. If Nbar is defined as the average number of ancestor-simulations run by a posthuman civilization, and if f_I is the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations (or that contain at least some individuals who are interested in that and have sufficient resources to run a significant number of such simulations), and if Nbar_I is the average number of ancestor-simulations run by such interested civilizations, the author of the paper you're citing concludes that:
Nbar = f_I * Nbar_I
This doesn't seem to make sense. To me, it makes more sense to write:
Nbar_I = f_I * Nbar
Am I just not understanding the math, or am I taking crazy pills, or what?
That you know of. Not everyone who experiences problems is going to report about them online; many Xbox 360 early adopters are not as technically savvy as you might believe, and even if they were, not every single person is inclined to rant about problems they might have encountered.
We can't know for sure what the report rate is for problems. Of those who have reported problems to the manufacturer or to the retailer, how many also bothered to report problems in a public forum?
I would guesstimate that maybe 10% of people who actually had Xbox 360 problems talked about them publicly. So if maybe 100 people (to use your guesstimate) reported problems in online forums, then maybe about 1000 people actually are having problems. That still might not seem like a lot, but the number of units sold thus far is low, so the percentage is probably pretty high. Microsoft's target is to sell 3 million units by the end of the year, and I don't think they've shipped even 2 million yet.
On the other hand, this is the initial production run. I'm sure some kinks will get worked out as the process is streamlined and better QA is put where needed.
The number of units sold thus far isn't that high. For so many reports to come out so quickly after the launch of the console, one has to wonder. You can't assume every single person griping is a Microsoft hater. (And if someone truly hated Microsoft, why would they buy an Xbox 360?)
That's one (anecdotal) data point... which is insufficient evidence to draw any conclusions from. Let's see what the picture is like when the market is saturated. Right now, demand far outstrips supply.
Yes, but the PS2 has gone through several major hardware updates, has a larger installed base, and still sells more units. Not to mention that the PS2s that are failing have probably been in service for longer than a couple weeks (which is about how long the Xbox 360 has been out, as of this writing). Of course the percentages are going to be higher.
I wonder how many Xbox 360s that are currently in use are going to fail after one month, or one year? We don't know this yet.
No denying that Sony has its share of quality issues with the PS2. My original PS2 bit the dust after maybe 2 years of service; the laser seemed to be a common point of failure for early units. Each successive generation was an improvement in some way, but Sony's main drive was to reduce production cost, not to improve build quality. So while some issues have been fixed, newer issues have cropped up to replace old ones. I can only imagine the engineering compromises needed to make the new "slimline" PS2.
Still, just because Sony's product has issues doesn't give an excuse to Microsoft. "Hey, we may have some problems, but we're better than those guys!"
No doubt that the Slashdot crowd on the whole dislikes Microsoft, but people have high expectations for Microsoft products, especially considering what they cost. Consider also that the Xbox 360 is an "appliance" type device, as it's sold as a gam
Actually, according to this site, they've done it at least once, and they've engaged in some other tactics to discourage competition using patents as bludgeons or bargaining chips.
Here's a direct quote from the site I linked above:
The implication is that SAMBA is on legally dubious footing. This also explains why current SAMBA development is at a glacial pace -- its developers need to reverse engineer a good chunk of Microsoft's networking code. That would be needed anyway, since Microsoft's own implementation is idiosyncratic and does not exactly conform to their own published specification.
Calling something a myth doesn't make it so.
Condescending, yes. Racist? You're absolutely full of sh*t. Having a low tolerance for bad logic and bad grammar doesn't make me a racist. It makes me an elitist. Get it right, douchebag.
If you can't be trusted to understand what someone is saying, you can't be trusted to evaluate what they are saying. I stand by what I wrote, though my suggestion that you weren't a native English speaker was meant mostly tongue-in-cheek -- I suspected you were just a poorly educated jerk who probably skated by on talents that had nothing to do with language skills.
Writing something at 3AM buys you some sympathy points for bad grammar, but it doesn't excuse you from holes in your reasoning.
But you're going to anyway, aren't you? I still know I'm right, and nothing you say is going to convince me otherwise. If my manner of expressing myself bothers you, tough. The message and the messenger are not the same thing, and even if you despise the messenger, the message is still valid.
You also haven't offered any counter-examples as "proof" of your point of view. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I can't possibly see how you "won" anything, except the right to claim moral superiority. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Ah, scratch what I wrote about moral supriority. :-) You're just a d*ck.
What office is this? What developers? What authors? It's easy enough to throw around the implication that you work for a publication, or that you work for a company that does some form of software development. What industry, exactly, are you talking about? The games industry? The "computer" industry? IT is pretty big, so that could mean anything. You could be a big fish or a little fish...
But you know what? I don't give a rat's ass. If I ever met you in person, I'd have some choice words for you.
I love how you purport to speak for the entire industry, whatever industry it is that you claim to be a part of. Well, buddy, I'm a developer too, and I have a few major projects under my belt. Chances are we run in similar circles -- assuming, of course, that you're not lying. I don't share your opinion, and I'll bet a lot of other people in my line of work don't share your opinion either. I know of several close personal friends in IT who think you're full of it. What, the flurry of comments taking you to task over Dvorak being a "Mac proponent" wasn't enough of a clue?
Well, despite the fact that there's no scientific consensus on what, if anything, the word "race" means, I know damn well what a racist is. Having contempt for those who lack proper communication skills, and who then seek to "school" others, doesn't make me a racist. It makes me an elitist. The fact that you have indirectly refuted my claim that you're not a native English speaker only means that you've taken away what tiny excuse you might have had for being woefully misinformed.
According to the article, "...Microsoft felt it unnecessary to patch a flaw six months ago that was originally low risk but mutated in to something extremely dangerous." This is, presumably, in reference to the JavaScript exploit that was recently covered on Slashdot and in an Eweek article.
The thing is, this flaw didn't "mutate" -- it's just that we didn't until recently understand how dangerous this security flaw really is. That there's already a working proof of concept is alarming.
It's quite inaccurate to say that the flaw "mutated" when in reality it never changed -- only our understanding of it changed. Who's to say that someone, somewhere, wasn't already aware of the true potential for abuse when the flaw was first discovered half a year ago? Microsoft didn't make fixing this a high priority because they were lulled into the belief (along with almost everyone else, apparently) that this was a simple DoS exploit instead of the own-the-machine exploit it turned out to be. (Yeah, it takes a lot more work to actually gain control of the machine, but the same fundamental mechanism is used.)
I took a gander at that RFC you linked to, and it's actually a joke page. I'm surprised the IETF would host a gag like this! (I probably shouldn't be...)
I had thought, however, that there were some real documents out there detailing the use of IP for interplanetary communication.
I mean, it's fun to talk about IP addressability down to individual atoms, but where's the meat-and-potatoes? Doing a Google search on "IP interplanetary" yields all kinds of tantalizing results, with some actual discussions out there on the problems. (For example, TCP won't work with long latencies, but IP itself and protocols layered on it like UDP are latency-insensitive.)
I hadn't tried this in Firefox 1.5, but in 1.0.7, Firefox became unresponsive for a couple minutes, opening a couple new windows (which might have been dialogs, but with a lot of gobbledygook in them)... and eventually I regained control of Firefox (after about 5 minutes) with no need to kill the app.
So, a relatively brief hang, not an actual crash, would seem more likely. If you're impatient, I suppose you might think the app "crashed," but it's a recoverable state.
This is nonsense. Clearly, you are not a native English speaker; if it weren't clear previously, this post has confirmed it. You clearly have poor English comprehension skills, and it shows.
John Dvorak is a pundit. His job is to make predictions. Just because he got one or two of his crazy predictions right doesn't mean anything; most of his predictions were ridiculous because they didn't even seem plausible, but statistically, he was bound to get one or two predictions right. The "prediction" that OS X was moving to Intel is hardly something I'd give Dvorak credit for -- especially when you consider that it was a well known fact among technically-versed Mac users that Apple had been maintaining an x86 port of their next generation OS since the Rhapsody days (i.e., before it was named Mac OS X and marketed as such).
People weren't slamming Dvorak's "predictions" because they "didn't want to hear" them; they slammed his predictions because most of them were laughable, and there were usually many reasons -- reasons of logic, reasons of practicality, technical reasons, etc. -- why most of Dvorak's predictions would never come to pass. For the vast majority of Dvorak's predictions, there still are good reasons to disbelieve them.
Don't worry, I'll be providing about a dozen links and quotes just to prove what a dolt you are. Not that this would matter, since you won't interpret the articles the same way a (sane) native English speaker would.
Besides, since when does giving Apple more credit than they deserve equate to writing a puff piece about Apple? You can still savagely and unfairly criticize Apple and write a scathingly negative article about Apple or the Mac, and still give Apple more credit than it deserves in the same article. It's happened before, and this is a common tactic that poison-pen authors use to defend themselves against accusations of bias. "Well, if I'm so anti-Apple, how come I said some nice things about Apple in this recent article?" Yet when you read the article the author references, it's stingingly anti-Apple with only one or two positive comments thrown in to give the appearance of balance.
So, let's get busy with some links to John Dvorak articles where he clearly shows anti-Apple or anti-Mac bias. (Apologies since some of these links have been posted elsewhere.)
Grim Macintosh Market Share Forebodes Crisis (published in December, 2004)
Media Bias and Technology Reporting (published October, 2005) This was also referenced in a MacDailyNews article. Dvorak laughably claims that the media is biased against Microsoft and in favor of Apple. If that's so, why the never-ending stream of "Apple is dying" articles in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere up to and even for a year or so after Steve Jobs returned to Apple? Or is Dvorak claiming that the press suddenly warmed up to Apple in the last few years because it's fashionable? It seems to me that the press is, by and large, a fa
This is actually two major assumptions; one, that syncing recorded shows from the DVR onto the video iPod won't actually happen; and two, that synchronization will only go one way.
What about video content that is purchased through the iTunes Music Store and legally resides on the iPod? If you sync your iPod primarily on a desktop computer (Mac or PC) and then carry your iPod to the living room and plug it into the dock on top of the DVR, shouldn't you expect to view the programs you paid for? They needn't even be copied from the iPod's hard drive to the DVR's; they can be viewed in place, similar to how the Xbox 360 allows you to play music from a plugged-in iPod.
Then again, a home network would obviate the need to do even this much.
If Apple uses a dual-core Yonah (or whatever the Intel code-name is for the dual-core Pentium M derivative that Apple will be using) or any of Intel's beefier dual-core offerings, I think the transcoding could be done very quickly and efficiently -- especially for SD (standard definition) offerings. HD is another story, but then again, would you really want to cram HD content onto your video iPod?
OK, for the umpteenth time, say it with me now: The Xbox 360 CPU, code named Xenon, is not a PPC970. It is a custom triple-core processor that shares little in common with the PPC970 except an instruction set. The architecture is completely different.
For an excellent overview of the Xenon, please see ArsTechnica's article. Each core on the Xenon has a different number of execution units from the PPC970 core, and the pipelines are deeper in the Xenon to accommodate higher clock speeds. The Xenon also lacks out-of-order execution, which is a key feature in the PPC970.
The Sempron is an IA32 processor (x86 instruction set; not sure if the Sempron includes x86-64 instructions or not, or which versions). Microsoft made a clear decision to abandon x86 processors in favor of PowerPC for their gaming consoles. PowerPC chips can be made very energy efficient -- just look at the latest G4 processors from Freescale -- but for high performance and high clock speeds, power consumption needs to increase too.
Not sure if this is confirmed to be related to the orientation of the console (vertical vs. horizontal), but I know of several local gamers who are having problems with scratched game discs. My coworker stopped by one of the local gaming stores this weekend and ran into an irate gamer who showed an actual disc that was scratched -- it's bad, too. A perfect circle gets carved into the surface of the game disc.
Anyone running into this issue with the Xbox 360 should try laying the console flat instead of standing it on its end (the way most ads depict the system). Not sure if that will actually help, but it can't hurt at this point.
Considering that many of the games retail for $60 a pop, I'm amazed people are actually running out and buying replacements when this disc scratching issue comes up.
Cue the usual litany of "Where are my mod points when I need them?"
I'm not sure what's scarier -- that TheNetAvenger was modded +4 Informative for stating that John Dvorak has been a Mac advocate for the last 15 years, or that the people who called TheNetAvenger on this have less positive moderation on their comments.
I don't think it's any secret that John Dvorak has turned on Apple, and the last decade has seen an almost unending parade of negative articles by Dvorak regarding Apple and the Mac platform. He's predicted the demise of Apple more times than I can count, and he's made some very unflattering comments about most of Apple's products that have gone on to do very well in the market. (Dvorak was, in fact, the first person I can recall comparing the iBook to a toilet seat, no doubt informing Apple's decision to make the 2001 iBook a more conventional looking laptop.)
I haven't personally seen or read anything pro-Mac or pro-Apple coming from Dvorak since my college days -- and I graduated in 1992. Almost every time a Dvorak article is linked in Slashdot, you will see a flurry of comments posted slamming Dvorak for his anti-Mac bias -- even if the article in question isn't all that biased or anti-anything. That's how much good will Dvorak has burned with the Mac community and with Apple.
I won't bother providing URLs to back up my arguments, as other commenters in this thread have already done the leg-work for me. Instead, I'm going to plead with moderators: won't you please think of the children?
In the state of Arizona, you're automatically at fault if you rear-end someone. It's possible to argue your way out of the ticket in traffic court if you can prove that the person in front of you performed an illegal lane change or some other unsafe maneuver (i.e., cut you off) prior to the accident. That's hard to prove without witnesses.
The way the law is written has a lot to do with it; in Arizona, it's "failure to control your speed in order to avoid a collision." The idea being, if you are following behind someone in traffic, you are required to maintain a safe following distance and a proper speed; if the guy in front of you slams on his brakes, you must be able to stop without hitting him.
I am not a lawyer (usual disclaimers apply), but I've been on both ends of this equation in Arizona. This little bit of law snags more unwary California visitors than almost anything else; as another poster in this thread commented, California law is a little less cut-and-dried, since the person in front can be faulted for "brake checking."
As a side note, I really had trouble figuring out what you were trying to say; the GP poster was expressing himself pretty clearly, but I had a hard time deciding which side of the fence you were coming down on. But I can assure you that if you are in Arizona and you rear-end someone, you will be ticketed, regardless. Cops here aren't even given discretion in the matter. (Side-swipes and other collisions that are not strictly front-to-back are another thing entirely...) Not sure if any other state is quite so absolute, but it's one data point to disprove your final assertion.
But if you read the boilerplate in the license agreement, they disclaim any warranty of reliability or fitness for purpose. Basically, they license you the right to run the software, but if it doesn't work (or doesn't work the way you expect it to), they're not liable.
I'm sure putting that boilerplate to the test in a court might create problems for Microsoft, not to mention the PR backlash they'd get... Besides which, some states (such as Arizona) have laws that supersede such boilerplate language.
I find myself agreeing with Dvorak. This is a conflict of interest for Microsoft, antitrust issues aside. I'm sure that Symantec or McAfee could always play the antitrust angle if they felt threatened.
If that's the case, why does Windows XP Home Edition default to making the user's primary account an administrative account -- one which requires no password unless you tell it explicitly to require one?
In many corporate IT organizations, it's become commonplace to grant administrative privileges to a user for their local machine; they still can't use those privileges network-wide, but it gives them enough ammo to shoot themselves in the foot. It's just more practical (in the eyes of IT staffers, anyway, if not in reality) to do that, rather than have an administrative account and password that's global which everyone knows. This has the added advantage of creating an audit trail so that when a user installs some unauthorized software on a workstation, it becomes pretty easy to tell who installed it.
Logging in with an unprivileged account and then running binaries piecemeal with administrative privileges sounds great in theory, until you have to run some ill-behaved software that assumes you're already logged in as an administrator. (This happens a lot at my workplace, but I can't really elaborate more than that.) The inconvenience and impracticality really has an effect on productivity.
I'm not saying that your suggestion (using "Run As...") won't work... just that in the real world, most people would chafe if they were forced to work like that. That, plus the ill-behaved 3rd party software issue I mentioned, really makes it not a very good practical idea.
Thank you! Where are my moderator points when I need them? Someone should mod this guy up.
Seriously, it's astounding how some folks assume that if you're a self-proclaimed computer expert or power user, that you have to automatically know everything they think you should know. There are varying levels of expertise, and while I know Dvorak isn't in the Guru league, he's not entirely a dope.
Oddly enough, this article by Dvorak is one of the few where I find myself agreeing with (most of) what he says.
I'm pretty savvy about Windows security, enough so that I have managed to keep the one Windows 2000 system I run at home from getting any viruses or other malware, but even I was unaware that CuteFTP had a nasty security exploit like that.
Then again, I wouldn't get caught dead running CuteFTP -- tried it a long time ago, many versions back, and it never really worked right for me.
You tell 'em, Sparky!
Seriously, dude, what exactly did you just add to the discussion? My point is that there is pedantry, and there is stupid pedantry. My post was pretty well reasoned and argued from the point of someone who knows how to write (and who has an advanced degree in that arena -- not that most folks here seem to care or respect that). The person to whom I was responding clearly was trying to treat English like a computer language. Natural languages are perverse and have fine shades of meaning; words are not sharply delineated and clearly defined, unlike the keywords in synthetic computer languages. Arguing from a dictionary definition isn't acceptable in academic circles for this reason.
In case you missed it, I was being pedantic from a different point of view than the person to whom I was responding. This isn't a binary, "either-or" proposition. The difference is, my brand of pedantry was more germane than the other guy's. Get it?
So, again, what exactly was your point, Mr. Coward? That computer nerds can't be bothered communicating in natural languages as well as the rest of the human race? Well, I'm a computer nerd who doesn't fit that mold. I make good money writing code for a living (got an advanced degree for that, too -- not that anyone really cares), and writing prose and poetry for my own pleasure, but I'm not stupid enough to conflate the two.
I think ifwm is right on the money. Hardly making an ass of himself!
Besides the obvious typo/spelling error above, you're quite wrong. India and Germany have "states" just like the US of A does. (I'm sure someone will bring up differences between "their" system and "ours," but the fact remains that the terms are the same, even if the organizational relationships might differ.)
It's pretty common in the modern world to refer to countries as "nation states" to avoid any confusion over the term "state." Contrary to your assertion, the sense of "state" which means "one of the more or less internally autonomous territorial and political units composing a federation under a sovereign government" does not derive from the notion that these territorial/political units were somehow once sovereign nation-states in their own right.
Well, aside from pedantically correcting someone else, you haven't really added much to the discussion. I think most reasonable English speakers and readers would understand the quote from the grandparent post to mean essentially what your corrected version means.
Having said that, I believe it's also true that having a good vocabulary means more than knowing the denotations (dictionary definitions) of a bunch of words; understanding connotations (implicit meanings, fine shades of meaning that distinguish otherwise synonymous words) is very important as well. Furthermore, someone with a good vocabulary should have a good grasp of when certain words are appropriate, whether those words are used in writing (scholarly or otherwise), or in speech.
Ah, yes. Recall I previously touched on the difference between denotation and connotation. To me, and other practitioners of the writing arts, the term "vocabulary" encompasses much more than what any dictionary could possibly relate. The definition you cite makes this plain as day; after all, the third sense listed, "A list of words and often phrases, usually arranged alphabetically and defined or translated..." is a sense best used for the words "dictionary" and "lexicon."
Is a vocabulary just a repository of words and their meanings? Only in the most shallow sense. When you say that someone has a good vocabulary, you're implying a lot more than that the person has an exceptionally large store of words and their meanings stuck in his head. "Good" in this sense means more than a relative measure of quantity. To me, and to my English and Literature teachers before me, having a "good vocabulary" means knowing when certain words are appropriate. Often, that stems from knowing the connotations that words have, and these fine shades of meaning are usually not reported in dictionaries (with the exception of collegiate dictionaries and the OED); this knowledge, in turn, often comes functionally, from a teacher and from writing experience. If you're lucky, you'll find expanded entries in e.g. the collegiate edition of Roget's Thesaurus which enumerate various synonyms and explain the subtle differences between them.
In closing, I might point out that citing a dictionary definition of a word is hardly a demonstration of cognitive skill, nor is it an unassailable or authoritative way to advance one's argument. As you may have no doubt noticed, different dictionaries can define the same words very differently, often due to editorial and philosophical differences between the publications and their staffs. That's why good teachers emphasize the use of primary sources -- and dictionaries don't qualify as primary sources.
My coworker has the Mazda 3 hatchback with automatic transmission, and he's getting approximately 30 miles per gallon. He also typically uses 89 octane fuel instead of the more widely used 87, and he claims it gives him a small performance boost; I reckon the higher octane fuel also gives him marginally better mileage than he'd otherwise have.
Not a rotary. An odd number of cylinders is easily doable with an inline configuration. Volvo S40 and S60 sedans have 5-cylinder inline engines, for instance. The pistons just need to be attached to the crankshaft at (360/n) degree intervals, where n is the number of pistons/cylinders.
Inline engines seem to do well up to about 6 cylinders. (My Volvo 960 has a 3 liter inline 6, for instance.) Odd numbers of cylinders are pretty rare, especially in North America, but there are still a few 3- and 5-cylinder car models out there.