Living on one of the less-populated islands in Hawaii, I have no reasonable hope of WiMax or LTE any time in the near future.
Oh, sure, ClearWire has been in Honolulu for ages, and in some of the more touristy areas of other islands, but here in the state's 2nd-largest city? Nah. Maybe the rain breaks it, I dunno.
These days, the options are DSL, Cable, 3G GSM from AT&T or maybe T-Mobile (can't imagine that being fast enough to do anything with, given load times on my iPhone) or EV-DO (presumably first-generation). Oh, and some of the off-grid folks in the hinterlands probably have satellite. I've considered the EV-DO option, but I do some work from home that requires dual VNC sessions, so I'm not sure whether it would be practical yet.
The DSL is at least pretty rock-stable - It's only gone out one or two times in ten years.
How about you implement a performance optimiser too, that looks for the most frequently accessed blocks and ensures they are evenly spread over the disks. If you take into account the performance of the individual disks themselves, you could allow for effectively a hierarchical filesystem, so that one array contains, say, SSD, SAS and SATA drives, and the optimiser ensures that data is allocated to individual drives based on the frequency of access of that data and the performance of the drive.
Props for being the only poster to bring HSM into this - I think it's increasingly necessary. Okay, sure, we've all got N times as much data as we did 10 years ago - but really, how much of that data are we accessing regularly, and how much of it is "just lying around?" I'd even like to see a couple more layers in that hierarchical system, some kind of near-online storage would be good. 15 years ago, I worked at a place that had an optical jukebox sitting next to one bank of main Sequent servers, and that thing held probably hundreds of optical disks. These days, you could replicate the idea with 32GB SDHC cards in less space (don't know if anyone has). And of course there needs to be a way to take the truly unused stuff all the way off-line.
I'm really waiting for good home HSM. Take something suitably automated like Apple's "Time Capsule" backup, give it optical burner and a SDHC card slot, and a way to tell my computer "hey, I'm getting full, I want to clean out the files you've touched least recently, please give me some media to shove them onto" and I will be a happy camper. (If this already exists, somebody please let me know!)
The upgrade from 128K to Mac Plus spec is actually pretty significant, since the 128K was only supported until MacOS 4 while the Plus was supported until 7.5.5 (which was a pretty decent OS). I suspect this is going to go more to someone who wants it because of the provenance, though, and rarely if ever get used. I hope whoever buys it sets it up to play a slideshow of Trek photos or something.
It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner
Does "unique" mean "just like the iPod Nano"?
(The Nano's ability to show artist and song names, and its "iTunes Tagging" features, shared with some FM radio iPod docks, also use HD radio. Apple just doesn't, for whatever reason, put "HD radio" in giant flaming letters in its advertising.)
You don't have to create a Runnable to use it; you just give it a block (aka lambda, closure, local function), which is simpler to declare than even an anonymous class (and can accept arguments to boot).
It isn't revolutionary, true, but everyone whose reviews I've read has agreed that it is a very good technology.
So basically you're saying that Apple is doing something that's already been done before, only making it easier and slicker?
I would argue that having an environment based on a Unix kernel doesn't imply the OS is poorly fitted to modern systems, or that it's archaic or "not modern" or whatever... Any more than Windows' history reaching back to (and before) the DOS days implies the same.
I thought the NT kernel strongly resembled that of VMS.:)
And anyhow, who cares - do you post to every Linux story saying "This would be great news if..."? Or do you just think you can get away with it because it's BeOS? And imagine the annoyance of someone posting to every OS X story, saying "This would be great news, if only Windows didn't already exist"?
Believe it or not, some people have an interest in products other than Apple, around here. If you don't like it, skip the story. This is the first BeOS story in ages, whilst Apple stories appear several times a day - you're hardly losing out here!
I think I understand. Your definition of "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" explicitly excludes anything related to business, or to history, or to business history. Right?
Believe it or not, some people have an interest in things like that, too.
Be was founded by a former Apple exec. it was almost bought by Apple over NeXT. Be and Apple are relevant to each other, if only historically.
And Linux? Yeah, what would have happened to Linux if Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT - and then succeeded to the same extent that it has with OS X? Be was not UNIX underneath, after all. Apple would still have a proprietary OS, instead of a proprietary userspace built on a bunch of development frameworks they've open-sourced. Give-and-take between the Apple and Linux communities? A lot more painful.
In the '90s, the market was Microsoft (proprietary) vs. Apple (proprietary) vs. UNIX (some proprietary, some open, including Linux). If Apple had gone with BeOS, and DEC, HP, Sun, and SGI had all basically become non-factors in the proprietary UNIX market, you'd have pretty much the same, but with open source taking more of the UNIX market, and only IBM still really flogging a commercial UNIX. Now it's Microsoft vs. UNIX (including open Linux and BSD, open-except-userspace Apple, and proprietary AIX ).
I find that change in market, and the history it hinged upon, interesting. Sorry if that bugs you.
Another big source of uncommon metals is sub-Saharan Africa - for example, something like 80% of the world's supply of either Cobalt or Coltan comes from mines in the Congo. And China has been making big inroads into that region too, in terms of international aid and trade.
There are times that being an officially godless commie state comes in handy, really. US shows up and says "we'll give you aid money as long as you don't promote safe sex, and oh, sorry, our business community is a little too nervous to really trade with you." China shows up and just says "look, we want to do business; you have resources we need."
Unsurprisingly, African governments are talking more to China these days.
NASA is an independent agency of the US government; the NASA administrator reports directly to the President (but doesn't serve on the cabinet). NASA and DoD do have overlapping interests, co-operate on a lot of stuff, and have a lot of inter-agency agreements, which you can find at http://www.sti.nasa.gov/codeid/ but if NASA were under DoD, there wouldn't be any need for inter-agency agreements.
In inline comments to the Google head guy's reply to the original blog entry, I find:
Google: Geoff asks why we decided to infer BISAC subjects in the first place. There is only one reason: we thought our end users would find it useful.
Scholar: The question is, why did you think end-users would find this useful? Which end-users did you talk to about this? I don't think you'd find a whole a lot of scholars who would embrace the idea of using the BISAC classifications in place of other library classification schemes. In fact, why would anybody think that a scheme designed for organizing the shelves of a Barnes & Noble outlet would be appropriate for a collection assembled out of the holdings of major research libraries?
I read this as "any book that can be found in the holdings of a major research library is only of interest to scholars." And I think he's entirely off-base. Nose-in-the-air "Scholars" like this gentleman fail to recognize that Google's efforts are about making material available to "the rest of us" who don't have access to those major research libraries. And categorical indexing of material makes complete and total sense if you expect to have non-PhD sorts searching for it.
I happen to be a scholar, in some sense, of one particular science. If I want to read some classic literature that has absolutely nothing to do with my science, should I be denied access because I'm not a scholar of that?
There's talk of possibly reallocating some of the money from the next thread down (since it's already been determined that there's no way to do what Bush wanted on the money they have) to actually keep the ISS operational long enough to do some of the meaningful science that was promised.:)
GNUstep FTW indeed! And thanks, because I think you've just come up with an answer to something I was pondering the other day - what Adobe will do for Creative Suite 5, since they want to go 64-bit on the Mac, and that can't be done using the transitional Carbon library.
They're going to have to totally rewrite it in Cocoa (which I think is frankly a good thing, since the current codebase probably dates back to the early-to-mid 1990s, and has just had more and more crap glued onto it over the years), but I was thinking it'd be an awful pain to maintain both a Cocoa codebase for the Mac and the plain old codebase for Windows.
If they can do an Objective-C codebase, and keep the differences between the code for Mac (using Cocoa everything) and the code for Windows (using GNUstep) to a reasonably low level, they can still have a single codebase, which would make life easier going forward. (Plus, it'd be a modern OO codebase.)
Good point. I should have said "as used in Cocoa" or something to be clearer. I'm not sure whether there are people out there writing Objective-C apps for the Mac without Cocoa, though. I guess there's always someone who won't use the nifty library and shortcuts and all that, because they're hardcore, efficiency nuts, or just masochists...
People with PTSD have a hard time dealing with reality. I'm not sure that helping them escape from reality into some virtual world is really going to solve things.
Sounds like they've just updated their dynamic (shared) library loader to be able to handle Objective C (aka Cocoa) instead of just plain C, and to be a little smarter about keeping track of what it's already got going on, so it doesn't duplicate things.
As a long-time UNIX and Linux (and other more esoteric OSes) geek, this alone doesn't impress me too much. The idea that they went through the whole OS and worked to get little efficiency/performance gains like this all over the place impresses me a little more.
We've already had the bad news - moon and mars are utterly unattainable with the current budget. Everyone's said it over the last few weeks, and I just heard it reiterated again in a dinner talk by Charles Kennel, who used to be a NASA associate administrator and is now on the Augustine Commission. So if you're Cook, you know your baby got knifed. No harm in bailing.
Kennel said he thinks it's time we suck it up and treat our international partners like actual partners, including depending on them for launch capability when we need to (after all, we already depended on Russia for a few years after Columbia) - and for really big projects like moon or mars, not go it alone when there's really nothing to gain by doing so.
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Living on one of the less-populated islands in Hawaii, I have no reasonable hope of WiMax or LTE any time in the near future.
Oh, sure, ClearWire has been in Honolulu for ages, and in some of the more touristy areas of other islands, but here in the state's 2nd-largest city? Nah. Maybe the rain breaks it, I dunno.
These days, the options are DSL, Cable, 3G GSM from AT&T or maybe T-Mobile (can't imagine that being fast enough to do anything with, given load times on my iPhone) or EV-DO (presumably first-generation). Oh, and some of the off-grid folks in the hinterlands probably have satellite. I've considered the EV-DO option, but I do some work from home that requires dual VNC sessions, so I'm not sure whether it would be practical yet.
The DSL is at least pretty rock-stable - It's only gone out one or two times in ten years.
How about you implement a performance optimiser too, that looks for the most frequently accessed blocks and ensures they are evenly spread over the disks. If you take into account the performance of the individual disks themselves, you could allow for effectively a hierarchical filesystem, so that one array contains, say, SSD, SAS and SATA drives, and the optimiser ensures that data is allocated to individual drives based on the frequency of access of that data and the performance of the drive.
Props for being the only poster to bring HSM into this - I think it's increasingly necessary. Okay, sure, we've all got N times as much data as we did 10 years ago - but really, how much of that data are we accessing regularly, and how much of it is "just lying around?" I'd even like to see a couple more layers in that hierarchical system, some kind of near-online storage would be good. 15 years ago, I worked at a place that had an optical jukebox sitting next to one bank of main Sequent servers, and that thing held probably hundreds of optical disks. These days, you could replicate the idea with 32GB SDHC cards in less space (don't know if anyone has). And of course there needs to be a way to take the truly unused stuff all the way off-line.
I'm really waiting for good home HSM. Take something suitably automated like Apple's "Time Capsule" backup, give it optical burner and a SDHC card slot, and a way to tell my computer "hey, I'm getting full, I want to clean out the files you've touched least recently, please give me some media to shove them onto" and I will be a happy camper. (If this already exists, somebody please let me know!)
The upgrade from 128K to Mac Plus spec is actually pretty significant, since the 128K was only supported until MacOS 4 while the Plus was supported until 7.5.5 (which was a pretty decent OS). I suspect this is going to go more to someone who wants it because of the provenance, though, and rarely if ever get used. I hope whoever buys it sets it up to play a slideshow of Trek photos or something.
I thought people only posted while drunk on Fark.
Just when we were getting used to the paradigm of "Earth plus Plastic," someone wants to go use up the plastic!
It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner
Does "unique" mean "just like the iPod Nano"?
(The Nano's ability to show artist and song names, and its "iTunes Tagging" features, shared with some FM radio iPod docks, also use HD radio. Apple just doesn't, for whatever reason, put "HD radio" in giant flaming letters in its advertising.)
You don't have to create a Runnable to use it; you just give it a block (aka lambda, closure, local function), which is simpler to declare than even an anonymous class (and can accept arguments to boot).
It isn't revolutionary, true, but everyone whose reviews I've read has agreed that it is a very good technology.
So basically you're saying that Apple is doing something that's already been done before, only making it easier and slicker?
Shocking.
I would argue that having an environment based on a Unix kernel doesn't imply the OS is poorly fitted to modern systems, or that it's archaic or "not modern" or whatever... Any more than Windows' history reaching back to (and before) the DOS days implies the same.
I thought the NT kernel strongly resembled that of VMS. :)
http://www.google.com/search?&q=usaid+abstinence
Most of them are biased one way or the other, so you can pick which ones you want to read. :)
Apple would have gotten a better operating system for their purposes out of BeOS, but they got Steve Jobs with NeXT. Or was it the other way around?
I think what you're looking for is "NeXT purchased Apple for negative 429 million dollars."
And anyhow, who cares - do you post to every Linux story saying "This would be great news if ..."? Or do you just think you can get away with it because it's BeOS? And imagine the annoyance of someone posting to every OS X story, saying "This would be great news, if only Windows didn't already exist"?
Believe it or not, some people have an interest in products other than Apple, around here. If you don't like it, skip the story. This is the first BeOS story in ages, whilst Apple stories appear several times a day - you're hardly losing out here!
I think I understand. Your definition of "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" explicitly excludes anything related to business, or to history, or to business history. Right?
Believe it or not, some people have an interest in things like that, too.
Be was founded by a former Apple exec. it was almost bought by Apple over NeXT. Be and Apple are relevant to each other, if only historically.
And Linux? Yeah, what would have happened to Linux if Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT - and then succeeded to the same extent that it has with OS X? Be was not UNIX underneath, after all. Apple would still have a proprietary OS, instead of a proprietary userspace built on a bunch of development frameworks they've open-sourced. Give-and-take between the Apple and Linux communities? A lot more painful.
In the '90s, the market was Microsoft (proprietary) vs. Apple (proprietary) vs. UNIX (some proprietary, some open, including Linux). If Apple had gone with BeOS, and DEC, HP, Sun, and SGI had all basically become non-factors in the proprietary UNIX market, you'd have pretty much the same, but with open source taking more of the UNIX market, and only IBM still really flogging a commercial UNIX. Now it's Microsoft vs. UNIX (including open Linux and BSD, open-except-userspace Apple, and proprietary AIX ).
I find that change in market, and the history it hinged upon, interesting. Sorry if that bugs you.
Haiku is free, as in speech. That adds to its meaningfulness quite a bit I think.
Is it free as in beer, too?
...if Apple hadn't bought NeXT.
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
And now, they have stuff that provides a sensible approach to concurrency, BeOS or a clone of BeOS is a lot less meaningful.
(Actually, pages 9-15 of that review are all about Be's boat having sailed.)
I get a completely black page with a little yellow circling thing.
I think it's stealing everything off my drive. :)
Another big source of uncommon metals is sub-Saharan Africa - for example, something like 80% of the world's supply of either Cobalt or Coltan comes from mines in the Congo. And China has been making big inroads into that region too, in terms of international aid and trade.
There are times that being an officially godless commie state comes in handy, really. US shows up and says "we'll give you aid money as long as you don't promote safe sex, and oh, sorry, our business community is a little too nervous to really trade with you." China shows up and just says "look, we want to do business; you have resources we need."
Unsurprisingly, African governments are talking more to China these days.
NASA is an independent agency of the US government; the NASA administrator reports directly to the President (but doesn't serve on the cabinet). NASA and DoD do have overlapping interests, co-operate on a lot of stuff, and have a lot of inter-agency agreements, which you can find at http://www.sti.nasa.gov/codeid/ but if NASA were under DoD, there wouldn't be any need for inter-agency agreements.
In inline comments to the Google head guy's reply to the original blog entry, I find:
Google: Geoff asks why we decided to infer BISAC subjects in the first place. There is only one reason: we thought our end users would find it useful.
Scholar: The question is, why did you think end-users would find this useful? Which end-users did you talk to about this? I don't think you'd find a whole a lot of scholars who would embrace the idea of using the BISAC classifications in place of other library classification schemes. In fact, why would anybody think that a scheme designed for organizing the shelves of a Barnes & Noble outlet would be appropriate for a collection assembled out of the holdings of major research libraries?
I read this as "any book that can be found in the holdings of a major research library is only of interest to scholars." And I think he's entirely off-base. Nose-in-the-air "Scholars" like this gentleman fail to recognize that Google's efforts are about making material available to "the rest of us" who don't have access to those major research libraries. And categorical indexing of material makes complete and total sense if you expect to have non-PhD sorts searching for it.
I happen to be a scholar, in some sense, of one particular science. If I want to read some classic literature that has absolutely nothing to do with my science, should I be denied access because I'm not a scholar of that?
There's talk of possibly reallocating some of the money from the next thread down (since it's already been determined that there's no way to do what Bush wanted on the money they have) to actually keep the ISS operational long enough to do some of the meaningful science that was promised. :)
GNUstep FTW indeed! And thanks, because I think you've just come up with an answer to something I was pondering the other day - what Adobe will do for Creative Suite 5, since they want to go 64-bit on the Mac, and that can't be done using the transitional Carbon library.
They're going to have to totally rewrite it in Cocoa (which I think is frankly a good thing, since the current codebase probably dates back to the early-to-mid 1990s, and has just had more and more crap glued onto it over the years), but I was thinking it'd be an awful pain to maintain both a Cocoa codebase for the Mac and the plain old codebase for Windows.
If they can do an Objective-C codebase, and keep the differences between the code for Mac (using Cocoa everything) and the code for Windows (using GNUstep) to a reasonably low level, they can still have a single codebase, which would make life easier going forward. (Plus, it'd be a modern OO codebase.)
Good point. I should have said "as used in Cocoa" or something to be clearer. I'm not sure whether there are people out there writing Objective-C apps for the Mac without Cocoa, though. I guess there's always someone who won't use the nifty library and shortcuts and all that, because they're hardcore, efficiency nuts, or just masochists...
People with PTSD have a hard time dealing with reality. I'm not sure that helping them escape from reality into some virtual world is really going to solve things.
Sounds like they've just updated their dynamic (shared) library loader to be able to handle Objective C (aka Cocoa) instead of just plain C, and to be a little smarter about keeping track of what it's already got going on, so it doesn't duplicate things.
As a long-time UNIX and Linux (and other more esoteric OSes) geek, this alone doesn't impress me too much. The idea that they went through the whole OS and worked to get little efficiency/performance gains like this all over the place impresses me a little more.
Well, that would explain why the Australians are so interested.
We've already had the bad news - moon and mars are utterly unattainable with the current budget. Everyone's said it over the last few weeks, and I just heard it reiterated again in a dinner talk by Charles Kennel, who used to be a NASA associate administrator and is now on the Augustine Commission. So if you're Cook, you know your baby got knifed. No harm in bailing.
Kennel said he thinks it's time we suck it up and treat our international partners like actual partners, including depending on them for launch capability when we need to (after all, we already depended on Russia for a few years after Columbia) - and for really big projects like moon or mars, not go it alone when there's really nothing to gain by doing so.
I ditched Twitter ages ago in part because of its lack of location awareness, since that capability was offered by other services like Brightkite.