This (working to launching rockets from baloons) has been done in the US for quite some time.
According to Wikipedia's entry on James Van Allen (who, you may recall, passed away just last month), the concept of the "Rockoon" was announced March 1, 1949 by Van Allen and his fellow researchers (some of them US Navy).
I'm sure Dr. Van Allen would be glad to see people continuing to follow in his (impressive) footsteps.
Well, we all know that if you're going out for a drive and might encounter strong crosswinds, or have to drive behind a 747 at takeoff thrust, you're better off with a Mondeo than a 2CV!
30% of Facebook users are 35 or older? I thought that it was invented for college students.
Pretty much so... but the criteria used to determine college affiliation was possession of a.edu address. That tended to set a lower bound on age (relatively few people below 16-17 are affiliated with colleges or universities in ways that get them addresses) but didn't set an upper bound at all, when you factor in things like:
a) People "going back to school" - my wife "mommy-tracked" for 8 years, then picked up a second degree at 33. b) Grad students, who are typically about 23-28 instead of 17-23 c) Postdocs, who are typically about 28-33 d) Alumni, who can be any age d) Staff, who can also be any age - I'm staff, 35, and on Facebook because a lot of the grads and postdocs I work with are on there. (And for the free music from Apple.) e) Faculty, who are likely to be even older than staff.;)
Suddenly that skewed age figure is a lot more attainable.
I've worked in libraries. I've even worked specifically in the periodicals / microstorage area.
Yes, libraries have the New York Times and whatever else, back a hundred or so years, on microfilm or microfiche. This is all well and good. However, the available indices may not offer full-text searches, and even if they do, they're limited to certain publications or sets of publications. Additionally, microfiche's random access capability isn't all that great, and microfilm's is nonexistent.
If Google links data from a bunch of other indices, so that I can do one search, get a bunch of different results, and then decide whether to go to the library and print copies from microstorage for a small cost per page, or simply buy an electronic "reprint" and save it as a PDF, that's better than what I had before.
I maintain some "clippings" of instances where I've been quoted or cited in the press. (Others who aren't famous enough to be "household names," but do get quoted every year or so, may do something similar.) So of course, I plugged in my name, and voila! the news archive search knew about an article from 2000 that I totally didn't remember.
I haven't yet bought the full text, but I probably will (have done this in the past when I lost or never got a paper copy of a clipping) just to see whether it was simply citing a web site I used to run, or whether they actually interviewed me and I just don't remember.;)
I was quite pleased when Apple announced Boot Camp. I was quite pleased when Parallels was announced. And I was quite pleased when CodeWeavers announced CrossOver for the Intel Macs. But... I haven't had to run something that was only available for Windows since... geez, sometime in 2004 or early 2005. (When I did, it was Access, which is part of the Windows versions of Office, but not the Mac versions, so maybe that's why people want to run Office.)
This year, I've pondered all the various ways to run Windows and/or Windows apps on my Intel MacBook, but I keep getting hung up on the problem of not being able to think of any that I actually want or need to run. I did grab CrossOver and IE6 just to see how it installed, but other than that, I'm at a loss.
I've been asking friends what really good apps there are for Windows that don't have equivalents on the Mac, and the best they can do is a vague "games?" in reply. Not really something I find compelling.
Toward the end of its life, a Microsoft OS becomes fairly reliable and stable.
This is bad, because people might decide it's worth sticking with indefinitely.
Therefore, themasses must be goaded into upgrading to a shiny! new! OS which is a 1.0.0 release at best and will require umpteen more rounds of patching.
This is, of course, accomplished by EOLing past versions, and pointing out that oh, by the way, the latest batch of 43 security vulnerabilities has been in every version since Windows 3.11 and will only be fixed in this shiny! new! version.
Anyone who has been flying very often for very long knows...
How often, and for how long, are we talking about, here?
I've been flying since the 1980s. That means I remember the days when you could say your hello's and farewells at the gate, because the security checkpoint wasn't right next to the counter, and you didn't have to have a boarding pass to go through it. It means I remember when the husband of a friend 2000 miles flew out for a job interview 40 miles from me, got the job, and gave me the return half of his ticket so I could fly out and help his family pack and move - and nobody checked. It means I remember the days when I could take pictures of airliners without security threatening to confiscate my camera.
I used to work in travel, and was working in travel on 9/11/2001. I've flown somewhere around a quarter-million miles in the last 5 years. I've been through security dozens of times, in countries throughout four different continents. I've been places where I wasn't even allowed into the terminal building without a passport and proof of ticketing, and went through three metal detectors on the way to the plane.
The problem with your argument is that most of the benefits (lower prices, online ticketing and check-in, etc.) were already in place before 2001. I did about 25,000-35,000 miles each year in 1999 and 2000 - things were good back then! The things people are complaining about, on the other hand, have happened since 2001, and there really haven't been any improvements in other areas to offset them.
And a lot of intensely stupid things have been done, too. Like the TSA spending taxpayer money to include "Transformer Robot Toys" on its list of things that are allowed in carry-on luggage. WTF?
I still fly a lot - 70,000+ miles last year, and around 50,000 in the first half of this year alone - so I've gotten good enough at knowing the rules, and can breeze through security... except that there are some people out there who aren't used to post-9/11 travel after almost 5 years of it, and those people seem to wind up in line in front of me!:)
Agreed, although gamers are by far not the only ones who go for desktops; there are plenty of non-gaming situations that benefit from quad-processor desktops and so on.
And yes, a laptop will probably cost more than an equally capable desktop - but it's quite easy to drop ten grand or so on a top-end Mac desktop, and significantly harder to do so on the (far less capable) top-end Mac laptop. There just aren't as many ways to expand it.:)
If you're talking about desktops or towers, then yes, the public couldn't care less. And Apple has woefully small market share in that area - probably around, what, 3 percent?
When it comes to laptops, though, there are different factors. Suddenly size, weight, battery life, and even appearance (well, for the fashionistas among us) come into consideration. And do I need to point out that a 17" widescreen notebook from Apple weighs about a pound less than one from anyone else?
This January, Apple's share of the US laptop market stood at 6% - about double its share of the desktop market.
This July, Apple's share of the US laptop market stood at 12% - double where it was in January.
Apple has projected that as universal binaries of more applications for "creative pros" become available, that share could go higher.
Maybe they'll continue to do better in notebooks than desktops.
There's your answer. At least nowadays (the Powerbook Duos were a while ago), Apple seems to feel that the notebook should contain everything you're going to actually need on a frequent basis. So there aren't external drive bays, docking stations, port replicators or things like that - and yeah, they lean toward the larger screens.
The old 12" iBook was 2.2kg, the 12" PowerBook was 2.1kg. So far, the MacBook Pros have been a little thinner and lighter than the PowerBooks they replaced. If the new MacBook is actually thinner (as has been rumored) than the old iBook, maybe they can get it down to 2kg or less - that'd be nice.
(If the specs are at all decent, I need to buy a few, anyway.)
Incidentally, I have multiple colleagues who use 12" PowerBooks and just tuck them (in thin sleeves) into their little-tote-bag purses. Amusingly, they frequently breeze through metal detectors where everyone else's laptop gets taken out and turned on, because after all, nobody wants to search a purse.:)
What the AC said. Apple doesn't need to point out that in addition to iLife, for example, not being available for Windows (and it probably costing an arm and a leg to get similar functionality with similar integration between programs, if it can even be done), it's also shockingly not available for Linux and FreeBSD.
Why? Because people who think "Gosh, I want to keep track of my home movies on my computer, and burn DVDs of them, but I also want to be able to organize my photos and include some of them in the movies or the DVD menus, and I want to be able to include selections from my sizeable collection of music from tasteless 1970s movies" will, 99.several nines percent of the time, think of either a Mac or Windows.
Sounds like you are confusing radio interferometry and adaptive optics to me. It's highly unlikely that both demos you saw utilized the same technology to produce the results you saw.
Actually, I don't think he's confused. If they're using multiple scopes, that's almost certainly interferometry, which isn't just the domain of radio telescopes anymore. It's pretty widely done around the millimeter / sub-millimeter wavelength, and there are multiple places doing it optically (though more often in the longer infrared wavelengths, not necessarily in visible light) as well.
For example, the 2 largest optical telescopes on the planet, Keck 1 and Keck 2, get to (in certain wavelengths) an angular resolution of maybe 0.2-0.4 arcsends without adaptive optics. With adaptive optics, they can get down to around.04 arcseconds -- as sharp as Hubble.
But they can also be used as an interferometer, with an 85-meter baseline (between the two 10-meter segmented mirrors. The folks who run 'em claim that gets them down to an angular resolution of something like.005 arcseconds.
(Of course, when Hubble spots something interesting, the Kecks are often called upon to do follow-up work, since they've got much more light-gathering capacity, plus the interferometry and/or adaptive optics capabilities.)
Some of the topical areas are pretty well redundant or deprecated, if you ask me. For example, the "books" topic appears to be a superset of "book reviews," and the "NES" and "Nintendo" topics share a similar relationship. And when was the last time you really saw anything newsworthy about Be, Comdex, Democrats, Digital, ePlus, the 2000 Beanies, or TurboLinux?
All MS has to do is keep backward compatibility for legacy apps and most everyone already using it will simply stay with it.
The problem for Microsoft (and really, for Apple and other OS vendors) is that people won't upgrade to a new version of the OS just because it's there. Plenty of people are still running old-ass versions of Windows, or MacOS, or Linux. Microsoft makes its money by convincing people that they really need whatever new version of Windows comes out. Apple? Sure, they make some money off OS X, but not as much as they make off their hardware. If everyone took advantage of Boot Camp to run Windows XP on their Macs, Apple would be fine. Take away Microsoft's OS (upgrade) revenue, and it's a different story.
I'd really love to see Apple with, oh, 25% of the market. Enough that people really take them seriously, but not enough to be in charge.
Agreed. I'd be quite happy with a 40-30-30 split between Windows, Mac, and Linux/BSD/etc. That way, each of the main OS categories would have enough of the market to be worth supporting for third-party hardware and software companies. Linux folks, wouldn't it be nice if hardware that needs drivers came with drivers, consistently? Mac folks, wouldn't it be nice if hardware that needs drivers came with drivers that didn't suck? (Yes, Canon, I'm talking to you. Love your shiny toys, but wish your people could code their way out of a wet paper bag.)
Of course, I'd be happier still if Windows went back to being what it originally was - a GUI shell that sat atop another OS, a la X or PC/GEOS - and Microsoft dropped in something safer "behind the scenes." Like Linux, or Darwin. Microsoft has done pretty well at supplying applications and programming tools... but I wish they'd leave the non-pretty stuff, like, oh, say, network security, to folks who know what they're doing.;)
Um... Microsoft already *did* this. It was called Windows NT. It had a VMS-like core, originally it ran on all kinds of hardware, and making it backward-compatible with DOS and whatnot was a lot of work.
Of course, the VMS-like core might not have been the best idea, since, well, UNIX was also widely available... but oh well, live and learn.;)
Ah, but you *can* get that license. (Or, more likely, whatever software you use comes from a company that took care of that little detail for you.) Try, on the other hand, to get a license for FairPlay DRM.
If something is available to literally anyone via some nominal license fee, it's really hard to say it's proprietary. Proprietary is more like "closed source."
*shrug* I'd have to vote for "Record label doesn't let Apple sell song on US iTunes store that's not for sale in brick-and-mortar UK stores yet, for whatever reason."
And then I'd go back to not caring, I guess, since the US store had Trans-Siberian Orchestra's album "Beethoven's Last Night" when I looked for it this afternoon.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure Dr. Van Allen would be glad to see people continuing to follow in his (impressive) footsteps.
Clicking on "calenadar" or "notepad" throws me back into old-Yahoo-ness.
I might give it another look if they bring those features up to the same interface standards.
Well, we all know that if you're going out for a drive and might encounter strong crosswinds, or have to drive behind a 747 at takeoff thrust, you're better off with a Mondeo than a 2CV!
(Love that video...)
30% of Facebook users are 35 or older? I thought that it was invented for college students.
.edu address. That tended to set a lower bound on age (relatively few people below 16-17 are affiliated with colleges or universities in ways that get them addresses) but didn't set an upper bound at all, when you factor in things like:
;)
Pretty much so... but the criteria used to determine college affiliation was possession of a
a) People "going back to school" - my wife "mommy-tracked" for 8 years, then picked up a second degree at 33.
b) Grad students, who are typically about 23-28 instead of 17-23
c) Postdocs, who are typically about 28-33
d) Alumni, who can be any age
d) Staff, who can also be any age - I'm staff, 35, and on Facebook because a lot of the grads and postdocs I work with are on there. (And for the free music from Apple.)
e) Faculty, who are likely to be even older than staff.
Suddenly that skewed age figure is a lot more attainable.
I've worked in libraries. I've even worked specifically in the periodicals / microstorage area.
Yes, libraries have the New York Times and whatever else, back a hundred or so years, on microfilm or microfiche. This is all well and good. However, the available indices may not offer full-text searches, and even if they do, they're limited to certain publications or sets of publications. Additionally, microfiche's random access capability isn't all that great, and microfilm's is nonexistent.
If Google links data from a bunch of other indices, so that I can do one search, get a bunch of different results, and then decide whether to go to the library and print copies from microstorage for a small cost per page, or simply buy an electronic "reprint" and save it as a PDF, that's better than what I had before.
I maintain some "clippings" of instances where I've been quoted or cited in the press. (Others who aren't famous enough to be "household names," but do get quoted every year or so, may do something similar.) So of course, I plugged in my name, and voila! the news archive search knew about an article from 2000 that I totally didn't remember.
;)
I haven't yet bought the full text, but I probably will (have done this in the past when I lost or never got a paper copy of a clipping) just to see whether it was simply citing a web site I used to run, or whether they actually interviewed me and I just don't remember.
Quite handy for this sort of thing.
I've been pondering this, too.
I was quite pleased when Apple announced Boot Camp. I was quite pleased when Parallels was announced. And I was quite pleased when CodeWeavers announced CrossOver for the Intel Macs. But... I haven't had to run something that was only available for Windows since... geez, sometime in 2004 or early 2005. (When I did, it was Access, which is part of the Windows versions of Office, but not the Mac versions, so maybe that's why people want to run Office.)
This year, I've pondered all the various ways to run Windows and/or Windows apps on my Intel MacBook, but I keep getting hung up on the problem of not being able to think of any that I actually want or need to run. I did grab CrossOver and IE6 just to see how it installed, but other than that, I'm at a loss.
I've been asking friends what really good apps there are for Windows that don't have equivalents on the Mac, and the best they can do is a vague "games?" in reply. Not really something I find compelling.
Toward the end of its life, a Microsoft OS becomes fairly reliable and stable.
This is bad, because people might decide it's worth sticking with indefinitely.
Therefore, themasses must be goaded into upgrading to a shiny! new! OS which is a 1.0.0 release at best and will require umpteen more rounds of patching.
This is, of course, accomplished by EOLing past versions, and pointing out that oh, by the way, the latest batch of 43 security vulnerabilities has been in every version since Windows 3.11 and will only be fixed in this shiny! new! version.
How often, and for how long, are we talking about, here?
I've been flying since the 1980s. That means I remember the days when you could say your hello's and farewells at the gate, because the security checkpoint wasn't right next to the counter, and you didn't have to have a boarding pass to go through it. It means I remember when the husband of a friend 2000 miles flew out for a job interview 40 miles from me, got the job, and gave me the return half of his ticket so I could fly out and help his family pack and move - and nobody checked. It means I remember the days when I could take pictures of airliners without security threatening to confiscate my camera.
I used to work in travel, and was working in travel on 9/11/2001. I've flown somewhere around a quarter-million miles in the last 5 years. I've been through security dozens of times, in countries throughout four different continents. I've been places where I wasn't even allowed into the terminal building without a passport and proof of ticketing, and went through three metal detectors on the way to the plane.
The problem with your argument is that most of the benefits (lower prices, online ticketing and check-in, etc.) were already in place before 2001. I did about 25,000-35,000 miles each year in 1999 and 2000 - things were good back then! The things people are complaining about, on the other hand, have happened since 2001, and there really haven't been any improvements in other areas to offset them.
And a lot of intensely stupid things have been done, too. Like the TSA spending taxpayer money to include "Transformer Robot Toys" on its list of things that are allowed in carry-on luggage. WTF?
I still fly a lot - 70,000+ miles last year, and around 50,000 in the first half of this year alone - so I've gotten good enough at knowing the rules, and can breeze through security... except that there are some people out there who aren't used to post-9/11 travel after almost 5 years of it, and those people seem to wind up in line in front of me!
Agreed, although gamers are by far not the only ones who go for desktops; there are plenty of non-gaming situations that benefit from quad-processor desktops and so on.
:)
And yes, a laptop will probably cost more than an equally capable desktop - but it's quite easy to drop ten grand or so on a top-end Mac desktop, and significantly harder to do so on the (far less capable) top-end Mac laptop. There just aren't as many ways to expand it.
...he was constantly on the move, traveling around the world to help customers figure out how to use Microsoft's products securely.
Sisyphus had it easy in comparison to that.
If you're talking about desktops or towers, then yes, the public couldn't care less. And Apple has woefully small market share in that area - probably around, what, 3 percent?
When it comes to laptops, though, there are different factors. Suddenly size, weight, battery life, and even appearance (well, for the fashionistas among us) come into consideration. And do I need to point out that a 17" widescreen notebook from Apple weighs about a pound less than one from anyone else?
This January, Apple's share of the US laptop market stood at 6% - about double its share of the desktop market.
This July, Apple's share of the US laptop market stood at 12% - double where it was in January.
Apple has projected that as universal binaries of more applications for "creative pros" become available, that share could go higher.
Maybe they'll continue to do better in notebooks than desktops.
There's your answer. At least nowadays (the Powerbook Duos were a while ago), Apple seems to feel that the notebook should contain everything you're going to actually need on a frequent basis. So there aren't external drive bays, docking stations, port replicators or things like that - and yeah, they lean toward the larger screens.
:)
The old 12" iBook was 2.2kg, the 12" PowerBook was 2.1kg. So far, the MacBook Pros have been a little thinner and lighter than the PowerBooks they replaced. If the new MacBook is actually thinner (as has been rumored) than the old iBook, maybe they can get it down to 2kg or less - that'd be nice.
(If the specs are at all decent, I need to buy a few, anyway.)
Incidentally, I have multiple colleagues who use 12" PowerBooks and just tuck them (in thin sleeves) into their little-tote-bag purses. Amusingly, they frequently breeze through metal detectors where everyone else's laptop gets taken out and turned on, because after all, nobody wants to search a purse.
1. It's just an operating system.
2. It's just a CLI.
3. It's just a GUI.
Need I say more?
(Of course, the Mac has a rather nice OS, CLI and GUI.
What the AC said. Apple doesn't need to point out that in addition to iLife, for example, not being available for Windows (and it probably costing an arm and a leg to get similar functionality with similar integration between programs, if it can even be done), it's also shockingly not available for Linux and FreeBSD.
Why? Because people who think "Gosh, I want to keep track of my home movies on my computer, and burn DVDs of them, but I also want to be able to organize my photos and include some of them in the movies or the DVD menus, and I want to be able to include selections from my sizeable collection of music from tasteless 1970s movies" will, 99.several nines percent of the time, think of either a Mac or Windows.
Totally. And maybe Apple doesn't even need to buy Adobe - it could just buy a big whopping chunk of its stock, and a position or two on its board. :)
Sort of like Pixar's recent acquisition of Disney for negative however many million dollars.
Actually, I don't think he's confused. If they're using multiple scopes, that's almost certainly interferometry, which isn't just the domain of radio telescopes anymore. It's pretty widely done around the millimeter / sub-millimeter wavelength, and there are multiple places doing it optically (though more often in the longer infrared wavelengths, not necessarily in visible light) as well.
For example, the 2 largest optical telescopes on the planet, Keck 1 and Keck 2, get to (in certain wavelengths) an angular resolution of maybe 0.2-0.4 arcsends without adaptive optics. With adaptive optics, they can get down to around
But they can also be used as an interferometer, with an 85-meter baseline (between the two 10-meter segmented mirrors. The folks who run 'em claim that gets them down to an angular resolution of something like
(Of course, when Hubble spots something interesting, the Kecks are often called upon to do follow-up work, since they've got much more light-gathering capacity, plus the interferometry and/or adaptive optics capabilities.)
[obDisclaimer: I do stuff at Keck.]
Some of the topical areas are pretty well redundant or deprecated, if you ask me. For example, the "books" topic appears to be a superset of "book reviews," and the "NES" and "Nintendo" topics share a similar relationship. And when was the last time you really saw anything newsworthy about Be, Comdex, Democrats, Digital, ePlus, the 2000 Beanies, or TurboLinux?
All MS has to do is keep backward compatibility for legacy apps and most everyone already using it will simply stay with it.
The problem for Microsoft (and really, for Apple and other OS vendors) is that people won't upgrade to a new version of the OS just because it's there. Plenty of people are still running old-ass versions of Windows, or MacOS, or Linux. Microsoft makes its money by convincing people that they really need whatever new version of Windows comes out. Apple? Sure, they make some money off OS X, but not as much as they make off their hardware. If everyone took advantage of Boot Camp to run Windows XP on their Macs, Apple would be fine. Take away Microsoft's OS (upgrade) revenue, and it's a different story.
Agreed. I'd be quite happy with a 40-30-30 split between Windows, Mac, and Linux/BSD/etc. That way, each of the main OS categories would have enough of the market to be worth supporting for third-party hardware and software companies. Linux folks, wouldn't it be nice if hardware that needs drivers came with drivers, consistently? Mac folks, wouldn't it be nice if hardware that needs drivers came with drivers that didn't suck? (Yes, Canon, I'm talking to you. Love your shiny toys, but wish your people could code their way out of a wet paper bag.)
Of course, I'd be happier still if Windows went back to being what it originally was - a GUI shell that sat atop another OS, a la X or PC/GEOS - and Microsoft dropped in something safer "behind the scenes." Like Linux, or Darwin. Microsoft has done pretty well at supplying applications and programming tools... but I wish they'd leave the non-pretty stuff, like, oh, say, network security, to folks who know what they're doing.
Uh... Dell?
No, wait, that's not it.
Um... Microsoft already *did* this. It was called Windows NT. It had a VMS-like core, originally it ran on all kinds of hardware, and making it backward-compatible with DOS and whatnot was a lot of work.
;)
Of course, the VMS-like core might not have been the best idea, since, well, UNIX was also widely available... but oh well, live and learn.
Ah, but you *can* get that license. (Or, more likely, whatever software you use comes from a company that took care of that little detail for you.) Try, on the other hand, to get a license for FairPlay DRM.
If something is available to literally anyone via some nominal license fee, it's really hard to say it's proprietary. Proprietary is more like "closed source."
*shrug* I'd have to vote for "Record label doesn't let Apple sell song on US iTunes store that's not for sale in brick-and-mortar UK stores yet, for whatever reason."
And then I'd go back to not caring, I guess, since the US store had Trans-Siberian Orchestra's album "Beethoven's Last Night" when I looked for it this afternoon.
The track is only available from the iTunes UK store at present, I think. Google found links on Phobos, but iTunes said they were UK store, not US.