i really wish the resources would focus on this problem and not the applications to be had after the manufacturing challenge is met.
There are a ton of interesting problems out there. No shortage at all. For the most part the ones that get money dumped on them tend to be the ones that solve problems people are having (more so if those people have money). So knowing more uses for nanotubes is just going to increase the chances that more people work on making them, and have access to better equipment, and may actually figure it out.
So I'm all for figuring out what something is worth before we burn money on making it happen...aren't you?
For example I highly doubt they sold off the 1" Microdrive to Hitachi.
I wouldn't be. They are not selling all that well, despite being only around $300. Heck one came with my camera and I don't use it (FLASH is more rugged, and 320M is enough for most of my photo shoots....and when it isn't I have some 128M's, all of which will survive a fall to the ground)
Plus they already let some other places OEM them...
As there is a cable to the ear piece, I give it a two month lifetime, being careful.
I've had one for about two years. I don't use it all the time, so it may not last as long on a PDA. Then again the cable seems no more robust then the cable release on my camera, which does take a bigger beating. Maybe you just need to find a quality one?
Yes, and as soon as you call "Apple Support" complaining about problems they will start off by blaming those 3rd party components.
They haven't with any of my Macs (all of which have 3rd party RAM). They didn't even ask. And yes, some of the problems have been real hardware problems (like the sound not waking up after sleep...sometimes).
Heck, they even tried real hard to be helpful about a problem that could really have been Canon's fault (reading images over the USB from my camera was very flaky). Eventually I gave up and decided the PCMCIA slot was the "one true way".
Disks...or disk arrays. Tape backup. And even though you think it's dumb, loading DV images in, or writing out to DV tape...video production houses are big Apple consumers. It makes at least as much sense as having a fount mount USB on a headless server...
(yeah, I know, it doesn't have to be headless...and until 10.2 it maybe can't really be headless, but I think of rackmount machines as headless)
They overlooked the GNU toolchain and went BSD instead, and you're telling me it's got "taste"?;)
Yep, and not so surprisingly for Apple a more minimalist taste. Now twelve years ago there were more reasons then just "extra features" to like the GNU stuff more. The GNU stuff had fewer compiled in limits and didn't blow up when it hit them, and by and large the BSD stuff tended to (the BSD stuff was also thought of as bloated and huge vs. the AT&T stuff, I mean cat had switches? What!). However things started to change with the release of fuzztools and the associated paper. I think the BSD tools suffer far far less from stupid compiled limits. They still have fewer features then the GNU versions though (for example no color support in BSD ls, which I'm sure seems as exciting to some people as BSD's adding of a / after directory names did to people use to the AT&T way...and to other people just as bloated!).
It's very possible that iPod's will have to use this software to work with 10.2. And Software Update can get the software out to more users than just an announcement.
[...]
However, this should have been done with the software was released, not two months later.
On the other hand there is a lot to be said for letting the more savvy users act as yet another test phase before the people that would really suck up phone support time get a crack at the software. Or even just limiting the rollout rate of new software so if there is a serious bug that escaped testing they can halt the rollout without screwing each and every last user...
Having a sufficiently simple language definition makes having multiple compatible implementations a nonproblem. Consider Python -- it has three implementations (cpython, jython and stackless), and very rarely does one of the alternate implementations support something incorrectly. Scheme (well, R4RS and prior) tends to be consistantly well-implemented as well (granted, most scheme compilers and interpreters have varying extensions and such -- but it's rarer to see outright broken language features in them than in C++).
I beleve you....but...I think simplicity is only one part of the equation. There are two other big factors.
C++'s standard frequently races ahead of any and all implmentations (i.e. there is no rule that youhave to actually try something before you add it to the standard!). The other languages you brought up...and many many other languages (APL for example) tend to grow by exparamenting, and deciding how much benifit people get from the work once they know how hard the work actually is! Granted if the group that did it is working on a comercial implmnetation then there is a strong motivation to try to convince others that this is a fine addition, and easy to do too. It is still better then never having any compiler with partial specilation (or whatever) and deciding that is now a standard feature.
The other reason is the size of the prize. As far a sI know there is little if any money to be had from implmenting python or scheme, and there is clearly no money to be had from doing it poorly. For the most pary you get pride from doing a good job, and you might manage to make a little bank from it too, but not much. C++ is different, compilers are in haigh demand, mostly good ones, but with enough demand you can produce poor ones pass them off on unsusspecting fools and make real money (Visual C++ anyone?).
I will also mention I used a C (not C++) compiler in the late '80s that didn't support the whole language -- this was pre K&R so it was even a pretty simple language. What did they leave out? The struct keyword, and with it, all structures. It basically sucked. So you can make a crappy implmentation of any language.
I do freely admit though that if C++ were simpler, it would be implmented more fully more offten. There are a lot of features it has that I never use and could gladly see go (multiple inhartance, with or without virtual base classes for example). On the other hand there are features that I thought were of minimal value that I have seen used soooooo well that I have totally changed my mind (overloading for example, which I finally came to apreciate with the STL).
Because it lets you do complicated things. Part of the problem is I don't think anyone (including Stroustrup) have any idea of all the complicated things you can do with it.
That at least use to be true. In interviews the guy that designed the STL (Steponov?) shocked Stroustrop -- he didn't think anything like the STL could be implemented in C++ (and it turns out he was partly right, there were some minor language changes to make the STL work, and some bigger changes to make it work better/be simpler to implement).
If you want to see some of the really weird things you can do with the language, check out Andre Alexandrescu's "Modern C++ Design." You might also want to look at the signal system that gtk-- uses.
I'm just forced to add "Me too!" here. I miss gtk--'s signal system when using ObjC or pretty much anything else...and Modern C++ design is just chock full of interesting ideas that will totally drive maintance programmers apeshit.
You'd be amazed at how much has been missing. Mainly the STL stuff, but there's some bugs in templating in some compilers too.
I don't think gcc is missing any of the STL stuff anymore (or rather the includes and libg++). GCC does have trouble with some of the "new" namespace stuff, and some edge cases in the type system can do the wrong thing (however they are far enough on the edge that maybe I was wrong about them, not gcc).
It sucks when you try to write portable code in C++ and you end up not being able to use some cool stuff because not all compilers support it. A friend of mine switched to Java specificly because of this.
Well that is the nice thing about pushing all the complexity into the libraries (yes Java is a more complex language the C...but less then C++ or Perl). Hmmm, speaking of Perl (or even Intercal...) it is also an advantage of really only having one implementation too...
In the USA red and amber are acceptable colors for turn signals. Red is the more popular color (even though I think amber is better suited since red is used for the break lights).
No, I stand by my original point. "Shut Down" is a "Special" command, like "Restart", "Sleep", "Empty Trash", "Clean Up", and "Put Away". These should all be under the "Special" menu, where people will naturally look when they want to perform something special.
Feh, clearly the natural thing to do to power the Mac off is pressing the power button which will (on all my Macs at least!) bring up a little dialog box allowing you to Restart/Sleep/Cancel/Shut Down (shut down being the default).
So the real question is: can you pluck tracks out of the iTunes db, or do you re-rip stuff and serve it using (what, exactly)? Can you use iTunes as a client for this in any way?
Left to it's default settings iTunes under OSX will write rip'ed music into files like ~/Documents/iTunes/iTunes Music/Psykosonik/Unlearn/PGP.mp3 (where "Psykosonik" is the band name, "Unlearn" the CD's name, and "PGP" is the name of the track (and yes it is about that PGP!)). It also has normal ID3 tags for that info, and track number and some other stuff.
With iTunes you can either "pull stream" from a normal HTTP server, or you can "push stream" doing something I never really looked into. Unfortunetly while streaming iTunes won't let you seek inside a song, or restart a stalled transfer (both of which could be done with byte ranges, if supported by the HTTP server).
The thing I haven't figured out how to do (and to be honest have not tried hard on yet) is to let one OSX account play music out of another account on the same machine. Does HFS+ support hard links?
Combining all three or four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, sometimes even black) in one physical cartridge unit[...]It's pretty much the norm, I've noticed in the inkjet world
For the last year+ Canon's mid to high end inkjets have had separate tanks for each color. The newest Epson (or maybe the most recent 2 or 3) also seem to be doing this. Of corse the Epson has the added twist of needing a different "black" for the matte paper...
I'm very impressed by Apples willingness to sacrifice backwards compatibility to make a better platform.
What sacrifice? I have an extreamly old copy of MacDraw...one written for the 68000 CPU, a black and white display, and the single tasking (not even co-op multitasking!) OS'ed Mac. After I figured out how to get it onto my modern laptop, clicking on it will (eventually) get enough layers of emulation up and running that I can use it. Really. Without me having done anything special to OSX.
I had less problems doing this then getting Unix source of a similar age working again (the C language has drifted a little, it still used =+ for example, and had "VAX asm calls" for linked list stuff).
p.s. Navigation in the OS X file dialog is freaking miserable. What are the keyboard shortcuts? AFAICT, any key other than Tab or Return is linked to the command "jump to random location that the user doesn't want".
I totally agree. It looks like the column view in the Finder (which I use all the time), but none of the keys do the same thing. It is like they forgot about the "similar looking things should act similarly; things that act differently must look different!" GUI design rule.
Consider: A US Federal Court -- not some backwater municipal or state court -- has just ordered a wholesale invasion of citizens' privacy and personal information without a search warrant.
Ummmm, wouldn't the court order be the search warrant?
If an employee doesn't take vacation or call in sick on Clone Day, then surely he/she will make up for it some other time.
For vacation that is almost definitely true. For sick days it is not. Not all that many people I know use their maximum allotment of sick days each year. (Many don't use all their vacation, but everyone I know uses all the vacation that won't roll over or be converted to cash...i.e. if it is "use it or lose it" it gets used even if it is just to sit around at home!).
One thing you could consider doing is selling some stock for a loss. You'll get cash right away, and capital losses are a tax deduction.
You should check with a tax accountant. As far as I know a capitol loss can only be used to offset capitol gains...so unless you made money on stock, you can't save taxes with the loss.
Lesson to remember? Next time we are on an amazing economic streak, sock away some money for the future. Sure it's hard to do, but it's real useful for the inevitable crash (unless the crash is actually the downfall, in which case you would have been better off converting your assets to ammo, but...)
I like "STL Tutorial and Reference Guide" by Musser and Saini (Addison-Wesley Professional series, aka. The Swoosh books). Yes, the online guide is also very handy.
That one is nice because it has a lot of short examples. The Josuttis book has a lot more detail on many things (plus covers non-STL topics). Get both. Read the swoosh book first.
Is the Powerbook keyboard different? That, and "Esc" never seems to be where I expect it...and I use vi:)
Feh, learn to use ctrl-[ (I blame my dad for that one -- I still don't use ctrl-I for tab like he does though).
I'd probably even give on the "delete" issue if Terminal.app was workable, especially since there's Free software on sourceforge that lets me run X apps on OS X.
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There are a ton of interesting problems out there. No shortage at all. For the most part the ones that get money dumped on them tend to be the ones that solve problems people are having (more so if those people have money). So knowing more uses for nanotubes is just going to increase the chances that more people work on making them, and have access to better equipment, and may actually figure it out.
So I'm all for figuring out what something is worth before we burn money on making it happen...aren't you?
I wouldn't be. They are not selling all that well, despite being only around $300. Heck one came with my camera and I don't use it (FLASH is more rugged, and 320M is enough for most of my photo shoots....and when it isn't I have some 128M's, all of which will survive a fall to the ground)
Plus they already let some other places OEM them...
I've had one for about two years. I don't use it all the time, so it may not last as long on a PDA. Then again the cable seems no more robust then the cable release on my camera, which does take a bigger beating. Maybe you just need to find a quality one?
Um, I thought you could use a hands free ear piece and and switch to any app you want. Are you sure you can't?
They haven't with any of my Macs (all of which have 3rd party RAM). They didn't even ask. And yes, some of the problems have been real hardware problems (like the sound not waking up after sleep...sometimes).
Heck, they even tried real hard to be helpful about a problem that could really have been Canon's fault (reading images over the USB from my camera was very flaky). Eventually I gave up and decided the PCMCIA slot was the "one true way".
Disks...or disk arrays. Tape backup. And even though you think it's dumb, loading DV images in, or writing out to DV tape...video production houses are big Apple consumers. It makes at least as much sense as having a fount mount USB on a headless server...
(yeah, I know, it doesn't have to be headless...and until 10.2 it maybe can't really be headless, but I think of rackmount machines as headless)
Yep, and not so surprisingly for Apple a more minimalist taste. Now twelve years ago there were more reasons then just "extra features" to like the GNU stuff more. The GNU stuff had fewer compiled in limits and didn't blow up when it hit them, and by and large the BSD stuff tended to (the BSD stuff was also thought of as bloated and huge vs. the AT&T stuff, I mean cat had switches? What!). However things started to change with the release of fuzztools and the associated paper. I think the BSD tools suffer far far less from stupid compiled limits. They still have fewer features then the GNU versions though (for example no color support in BSD ls, which I'm sure seems as exciting to some people as BSD's adding of a / after directory names did to people use to the AT&T way...and to other people just as bloated!).
(yeah, I saw the smile, but...)
On the other hand there is a lot to be said for letting the more savvy users act as yet another test phase before the people that would really suck up phone support time get a crack at the software. Or even just limiting the rollout rate of new software so if there is a serious bug that escaped testing they can halt the rollout without screwing each and every last user...
I beleve you....but...I think simplicity is only one part of the equation. There are two other big factors.
C++'s standard frequently races ahead of any and all implmentations (i.e. there is no rule that youhave to actually try something before you add it to the standard!). The other languages you brought up...and many many other languages (APL for example) tend to grow by exparamenting, and deciding how much benifit people get from the work once they know how hard the work actually is! Granted if the group that did it is working on a comercial implmnetation then there is a strong motivation to try to convince others that this is a fine addition, and easy to do too. It is still better then never having any compiler with partial specilation (or whatever) and deciding that is now a standard feature.
The other reason is the size of the prize. As far a sI know there is little if any money to be had from implmenting python or scheme, and there is clearly no money to be had from doing it poorly. For the most pary you get pride from doing a good job, and you might manage to make a little bank from it too, but not much. C++ is different, compilers are in haigh demand, mostly good ones, but with enough demand you can produce poor ones pass them off on unsusspecting fools and make real money (Visual C++ anyone?).
I will also mention I used a C (not C++) compiler in the late '80s that didn't support the whole language -- this was pre K&R so it was even a pretty simple language. What did they leave out? The struct keyword, and with it, all structures. It basically sucked. So you can make a crappy implmentation of any language.
I do freely admit though that if C++ were simpler, it would be implmented more fully more offten. There are a lot of features it has that I never use and could gladly see go (multiple inhartance, with or without virtual base classes for example). On the other hand there are features that I thought were of minimal value that I have seen used soooooo well that I have totally changed my mind (overloading for example, which I finally came to apreciate with the STL).
That at least use to be true. In interviews the guy that designed the STL (Steponov?) shocked Stroustrop -- he didn't think anything like the STL could be implemented in C++ (and it turns out he was partly right, there were some minor language changes to make the STL work, and some bigger changes to make it work better/be simpler to implement).
I'm just forced to add "Me too!" here. I miss gtk--'s signal system when using ObjC or pretty much anything else...and Modern C++ design is just chock full of interesting ideas that will totally drive maintance programmers apeshit.
I don't think gcc is missing any of the STL stuff anymore (or rather the includes and libg++). GCC does have trouble with some of the "new" namespace stuff, and some edge cases in the type system can do the wrong thing (however they are far enough on the edge that maybe I was wrong about them, not gcc).
Well that is the nice thing about pushing all the complexity into the libraries (yes Java is a more complex language the C...but less then C++ or Perl). Hmmm, speaking of Perl (or even Intercal...) it is also an advantage of really only having one implementation too...
In the USA red and amber are acceptable colors for turn signals. Red is the more popular color (even though I think amber is better suited since red is used for the break lights).
Nor will it work on what was their top of the line notebook (the G4 PowerBook) until two weeks ago...
Feh, clearly the natural thing to do to power the Mac off is pressing the power button which will (on all my Macs at least!) bring up a little dialog box allowing you to Restart/Sleep/Cancel/Shut Down (shut down being the default).
I think the very same news item has this listed as in the next OSX.
Um, have you looked under the Air Port menu icon recently? Specifically at "Create Network..."?
Left to it's default settings iTunes under OSX will write rip'ed music into files like ~/Documents/iTunes/iTunes Music/Psykosonik/Unlearn/PGP.mp3 (where "Psykosonik" is the band name, "Unlearn" the CD's name, and "PGP" is the name of the track (and yes it is about that PGP!)). It also has normal ID3 tags for that info, and track number and some other stuff.
With iTunes you can either "pull stream" from a normal HTTP server, or you can "push stream" doing something I never really looked into. Unfortunetly while streaming iTunes won't let you seek inside a song, or restart a stalled transfer (both of which could be done with byte ranges, if supported by the HTTP server).
The thing I haven't figured out how to do (and to be honest have not tried hard on yet) is to let one OSX account play music out of another account on the same machine. Does HFS+ support hard links?
For the last year+ Canon's mid to high end inkjets have had separate tanks for each color. The newest Epson (or maybe the most recent 2 or 3) also seem to be doing this. Of corse the Epson has the added twist of needing a different "black" for the matte paper...
What sacrifice? I have an extreamly old copy of MacDraw...one written for the 68000 CPU, a black and white display, and the single tasking (not even co-op multitasking!) OS'ed Mac. After I figured out how to get it onto my modern laptop, clicking on it will (eventually) get enough layers of emulation up and running that I can use it. Really. Without me having done anything special to OSX.
I had less problems doing this then getting Unix source of a similar age working again (the C language has drifted a little, it still used =+ for example, and had "VAX asm calls" for linked list stuff).
I totally agree. It looks like the column view in the Finder (which I use all the time), but none of the keys do the same thing. It is like they forgot about the "similar looking things should act similarly; things that act differently must look different!" GUI design rule.
Ummmm, wouldn't the court order be the search warrant?
(yes, I do think it is a crappy order, but...)
For vacation that is almost definitely true. For sick days it is not. Not all that many people I know use their maximum allotment of sick days each year. (Many don't use all their vacation, but everyone I know uses all the vacation that won't roll over or be converted to cash...i.e. if it is "use it or lose it" it gets used even if it is just to sit around at home!).
g++ 3.something and the STL that comes with it is not bad. Not stellar, but not bad.
You should check with a tax accountant. As far as I know a capitol loss can only be used to offset capitol gains...so unless you made money on stock, you can't save taxes with the loss.
Lesson to remember? Next time we are on an amazing economic streak, sock away some money for the future. Sure it's hard to do, but it's real useful for the inevitable crash (unless the crash is actually the downfall, in which case you would have been better off converting your assets to ammo, but...)
That one is nice because it has a lot of short examples. The Josuttis book has a lot more detail on many things (plus covers non-STL topics). Get both. Read the swoosh book first.
Feh, learn to use ctrl-[ (I blame my dad for that one -- I still don't use ctrl-I for tab like he does though).
Try GLterm.