Not even close -- there are approximately 31.5 million seconds per year (pi x 10^7 for a quick mnemonic). The mass of the Earth is 6x10^24 kg. Planck's constant is 6.6x10^-34 m^2 kg / s.
Here I have to say that I don't know if I should be looking at the total energy of the Earth (mass-energy equivalence + kinetic energy) or just one or the other. In either case, however, the ratio of a year to a second is about 7 orders of magnitude. The ratio of the Earth's mass (which way less than the Earth's energy) to Planck's constant is about FIFTY-EIGHT orders of magnitude. So that mystery second is about 58-7=51 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE too big to attribute to the Quantum Zeno Effect.
I've run each iteration of OS X from 10.1 to 10.3 on multiple machines and have *never* had my dock crash. I have heard of it happening to people (especially in the early versions), but have never seen it first-hand. I'd suggest you look more closely at your system -- sounds like something is corrupt. A clean system install may fix your problem if you want to "take a hammer to it" as a fix.
Safari isn't perfect in standards-compliance, but it still does a great job overall. My only dissappointment with Safari is that I can't set site-based image blocking to make annoying animated ads go away.
You're right that Apple has had a couple of updates that could have used a little more work, but I expect Apple to put extra energy into that from here on out: Apple sells things that "just work", so their image is tarnished badly when they miss -- "just works" is a big selling point versus Microsoft. They'll give this extra review in the future.
Finally, the fast user switching is really nice if you share a machine (like I do at home). The ability to check my email without closing out the three documents my wife has open with unsaved changes is really nice. The "looks cool" rotation of the desktop was simply a nice touch -- the Quartz rendering engine makes the image manipulation fairly trivial, so why not?
Not funny? I don't think you understand the GRAVITY of the remark you just made! Didn't you think of the FRICTION a remark like that could cause? I think you have failed to see the POTENTIAL for humor in physics -- it's a great VECTOR for wit.
A few days ago I tried a seach for "cellular customer satisfaction". The first several pages were bogus resellers (many of them the same page under different URL's). None of them contained the kind of information I needed about how customers rate the various cellular service providers. This morning the same search is yielding lots of useful data instead of the fake spam-like pages I had been getting.
KUDOS to Google for fixing this! Whatever changes they've made to their pagerank algorithm, Google is suddenly working again like I expect.
Apple has generally been very responsive in fixing security problems. I don't have any reason to believe they would have acted differently in this case.
Since the historical trend indicates that Apple is good at issuing fixes in a timely manner, what makes you think that Apple has suddenly changed their policy on patches?
The real million dollar question here is whether or not @stake acted responsibly in releasing the details of the flaws publicly. Did they give Apple time to prepare the patches or did they publish too soon? Remember that @stake fired their CTO for making negative comments about Microsoft. To what degree is this firm a "white hat" security consultant vs. a Microsoft "compensated endorser"?
@stakes inability to tolerate anyone critical of Microsoft and this security flaw announcement which included erroneous statements that Apple would not fix the problem tend to bring @stake's credibility and integrity into question.
The parent post is much more informative that the story itself, which links to the Apple Special Message page while appearing to have no knowledge of the content on that page (i.e.: problem is a chipset bug, not a Panther bug).
After the previous story in which Apple was said to be refusing to release security patches for Jaguar anymore (with no links to any actual Apple statement), it looks like any story that seems to paint Apple in a bad light gets no review at all. Come on -- we should be able to expect a LITTLE better editorial review of story postings than this!
In this case the title of the story is misleading and sensational, while the content puts the blame on the wrong party. Apple is doing a good job of getting the word out to people that may have the faulty chipset so that they don't get burned by the problem. Making this sound like a failure by Apple is just plain wrong.
Actually, I'm well aware of the fact that a 64-bit OS (even though Panther does embrace some 64-bit extensions) is not yet available for the G5. The point is that if you want to compare what the chips are really capable of doing you can't run a bunch of apps that don't take advantage of the new chips capabilities and then believe you have a realistic idea of how well the chips work.
Now, if you want to compare how today's apps run on the next generation of processors, fine. That's a valid comparison, but it doesn't really address the real performance of the chips. You could also benchmark 8-bit app performance on a G5 to a P4 or Opteron, but what does it tell you about the potential of the chips? Again, I don't think the tests are wrong, I just don't think they really tell us much.
Right now the Spec benchmarks are about the only thing that works in getting some sort of realistic idea about the potential of the chips. Those indicate that we have a wealth of nice chip choices becoming available, no matter what your platform of preference.
So they compare 32-bit apps running on a 64-bit AMD chip to 32-bit apps running on a 64-bit G5 and conclude that the AMD chip is much faster than the G5.
This does nothing to benchmark the capabilities of the chips -- just the capability of the chips to run non-native apps.
Go back to your lives, citizens, nothing to see here...
Short answer: the US has lost more astronauts during space missions than the USSR/Russia. According to an airsafe.com article the Soviets lost 4 cosmonauts during space missions. The U.S. lost 7 on Challenger in 1986 and 7 on Columbia (although not all Columbia crewmembers were American).
If you expand the scope of the question to include ground-based deaths in the space and rocketry programs of the U.S. and the USSR then the numbers change dramatically.
The U.S. lost 3 astronauts early in the Apollo program due to a fire in their cabin. The Soviets had a string of ground-based disasters. In 1980 a Vostok rocket exploded on launch, killing 48 people. An even more dramatic failure (cloaked in secrecy for many years) was the October 1960 Nedelin Disaster as part of the Soviet Union's ICBM development program. At least 92 personnel died in the explosion of the R-16 on the launchpad.
It's really a moot point, because most viruses exploit vulnerabilities we don't know about yet.
Sorry, but that statement is just plain wrong. Almost EVERY virus/worm takes advantage of well-publicized vulnerabilities. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the fix is already available well before the virus arrives. Since patches were already available weeks in advance of the first appearance of "in the wild" viral code the recent widespread outbreaks tells us that the problem lies in getting new security patches in place, not in discovering them.
I *completely* disagree with you! To say that elderly individuals should not be taught due to their age is appalling. It's not just about giving people skills so that they can give us some sort of economic return later -- it's about improving quality of life. To allow elderly individuals that have little or no mobility to more fully take part in the larger community via the internet is to unshackle them from bodies that may have pretty much abandoned them. Maybe kids will learn more, maybe they'll take the knowledge further, but discarding our elderly as unworthy of learning is a travesty.
WiFi is built-in on the Superdrive models (some 15" and all 17"). The combo drive models (12" and some 15") have it as an option. My 15" PowerBook from November had it built-in (again, the Superdrive model).
We have about 350 employees and we are standardizing on Mozilla. Outlook and Internet Explorer are considered VERBOTEN here due to their inherent (and, in our opinion, insurmountable) security risks. You can read our statement regarding the issue on our website:
Thanks to our no IE/no Outlook policy we have avoided EVERY major MS email worm outbreak. That means no downtime from the outbreaks, which translates in hours or days of work time not lost. (Compare to MS itself, which seems to lose its email system due to a new worm for at least a couple of days yearly.)
No, you wouldn't pay $2000 to "surf the web and check email". If you wanted an Apple you'd spend $800 and get the entry-level eMac (which is what I just bought for my father-in-law). 17" CRT, CD-ROM, 128MB RAM, 800MHz G4 processor. Oh, and if you can get an educational discount it'll cost you even less!
The best part of his new Mac is that his 24/7 tech support person (me) can Secure Shell into his Unix-based system to fix the creative mistakes he makes -- no housecall required!
I think you may be mistaken for taking IBM's lack of vocal response to SCO as "ambivalence". SCO is storming around, yelling and screaming about how Linux and IBM have horribly wronged them. IBM is more professional: they won't posture, but they'll destroy them in the actual fight.
Any time you find yourself in a battle, the more you posture, the more you undermine your position by exposing your weaknesses through your bravado. It is better to approach a battle quietly, and then destroy your opponent completely. IBM knows this.
The biggest point the author appears to be trying to make is that Apple would do better if it was broken into a Apple Software and Apple Hardware. To me, that just seems crazy.
Apple Software would have to compete on x86 hardware for marketshare against Microsoft. I don't think Apple makes any real money on their software: the software gets people to buy their hardware. I think they'd be hard-pressed to compete against MS in this area. Most likely, Apple Software would go the way of Be, Inc.
Apple Hardware would have to go into the x86 PC business and would be competing against Dell and HP/Compaq. Instead of the higher end computers Apple specializes in currently, they'd be forced to compete on that lower end where profits only come through huge sales volumes. Dell would smash them in the hardware market.
No, Apple is a successful niche player because they own the hardware and the software. The seamless integration of the hardware and OS allows the company's products to become "luxury computers". They are a joy to use. Dell makes commodity computers. Apple may have a small marketshare, but so does Jaguar in the car business. Small is fine if your making a profit, something which the current Apple has a good history of doing. Break the company up and I don't see what either piece could do to stay afloat.
The remote-control-via-PDA is a great idea, except that the range on the IR beam from most PDA's is terrible. I tried a similar piece of software on my Palm IIIxe -- the range was only about a meter and a half. Kinda makes it pointless if you have to walk half way across the room to use it.
I did train it to open my wife's Jeep Cherokee, though (that's an IR model remote as well). Newer cars are going RF, so YMMV.
ABSOLUTELY! I first saw it when I was a kid -- I cried too! Many years later I made sure my girlfriend (now my wife for many years!) saw it. She said "You didn't tell me it would make me cry!!!"
Oh! And all the spaceships were owned by one of the big airlines from the 60's that is now long since gone, IIRC.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even close -- there are approximately 31.5 million seconds per year (pi x 10^7 for a quick mnemonic). The mass of the Earth is 6x10^24 kg. Planck's constant is 6.6x10^-34 m^2 kg / s.
Here I have to say that I don't know if I should be looking at the total energy of the Earth (mass-energy equivalence + kinetic energy) or just one or the other. In either case, however, the ratio of a year to a second is about 7 orders of magnitude. The ratio of the Earth's mass (which way less than the Earth's energy) to Planck's constant is about FIFTY-EIGHT orders of magnitude. So that mystery second is about 58-7=51 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE too big to attribute to the Quantum Zeno Effect.
I've run each iteration of OS X from 10.1 to 10.3 on multiple machines and have *never* had my dock crash. I have heard of it happening to people (especially in the early versions), but have never seen it first-hand. I'd suggest you look more closely at your system -- sounds like something is corrupt. A clean system install may fix your problem if you want to "take a hammer to it" as a fix.
Safari isn't perfect in standards-compliance, but it still does a great job overall. My only dissappointment with Safari is that I can't set site-based image blocking to make annoying animated ads go away.
You're right that Apple has had a couple of updates that could have used a little more work, but I expect Apple to put extra energy into that from here on out: Apple sells things that "just work", so their image is tarnished badly when they miss -- "just works" is a big selling point versus Microsoft. They'll give this extra review in the future.
Finally, the fast user switching is really nice if you share a machine (like I do at home). The ability to check my email without closing out the three documents my wife has open with unsaved changes is really nice. The "looks cool" rotation of the desktop was simply a nice touch -- the Quartz rendering engine makes the image manipulation fairly trivial, so why not?
Not funny? I don't think you understand the GRAVITY of the remark you just made! Didn't you think of the FRICTION a remark like that could cause? I think you have failed to see the POTENTIAL for humor in physics -- it's a great VECTOR for wit.
A few days ago I tried a seach for "cellular customer satisfaction". The first several pages were bogus resellers (many of them the same page under different URL's). None of them contained the kind of information I needed about how customers rate the various cellular service providers. This morning the same search is yielding lots of useful data instead of the fake spam-like pages I had been getting.
KUDOS to Google for fixing this! Whatever changes they've made to their pagerank algorithm, Google is suddenly working again like I expect.
Apple has generally been very responsive in fixing security problems. I don't have any reason to believe they would have acted differently in this case.
Since the historical trend indicates that Apple is good at issuing fixes in a timely manner, what makes you think that Apple has suddenly changed their policy on patches?
The real million dollar question here is whether or not @stake acted responsibly in releasing the details of the flaws publicly. Did they give Apple time to prepare the patches or did they publish too soon? Remember that @stake fired their CTO for making negative comments about Microsoft. To what degree is this firm a "white hat" security consultant vs. a Microsoft "compensated endorser"?
@stakes inability to tolerate anyone critical of Microsoft and this security flaw announcement which included erroneous statements that Apple would not fix the problem tend to bring @stake's credibility and integrity into question.
THANK YOU!
The parent post is much more informative that the story itself, which links to the Apple Special Message page while appearing to have no knowledge of the content on that page (i.e.: problem is a chipset bug, not a Panther bug).
After the previous story in which Apple was said to be refusing to release security patches for Jaguar anymore (with no links to any actual Apple statement), it looks like any story that seems to paint Apple in a bad light gets no review at all. Come on -- we should be able to expect a LITTLE better editorial review of story postings than this!
In this case the title of the story is misleading and sensational, while the content puts the blame on the wrong party. Apple is doing a good job of getting the word out to people that may have the faulty chipset so that they don't get burned by the problem. Making this sound like a failure by Apple is just plain wrong.
Actually, I'm well aware of the fact that a 64-bit OS (even though Panther does embrace some 64-bit extensions) is not yet available for the G5. The point is that if you want to compare what the chips are really capable of doing you can't run a bunch of apps that don't take advantage of the new chips capabilities and then believe you have a realistic idea of how well the chips work.
Now, if you want to compare how today's apps run on the next generation of processors, fine. That's a valid comparison, but it doesn't really address the real performance of the chips. You could also benchmark 8-bit app performance on a G5 to a P4 or Opteron, but what does it tell you about the potential of the chips? Again, I don't think the tests are wrong, I just don't think they really tell us much.
Right now the Spec benchmarks are about the only thing that works in getting some sort of realistic idea about the potential of the chips. Those indicate that we have a wealth of nice chip choices becoming available, no matter what your platform of preference.
So they compare 32-bit apps running on a 64-bit AMD chip to 32-bit apps running on a 64-bit G5 and conclude that the AMD chip is much faster than the G5.
This does nothing to benchmark the capabilities of the chips -- just the capability of the chips to run non-native apps.
Go back to your lives, citizens, nothing to see here...
Which Apple site is that??? I see SIX models of desktop well under $2000 (4 eMacs, 2 iMacs), and SIX laptops (4 iBooks and 2 Powerbooks) as well....
and I omitted the offerings for $1999 from my list...
If you count the $1999 offerings you get several more models -- including one G5!
If you don't think that ISPs are scanning computers for viruses, trojans, etc, you're wrong.
I *know* my ISP is scanning:
http://security.rr.com/probing.htm
Simple enough: cut the efficiency in half and you need double the area to get the same amount of power.
Exactly what is the body count on both sides?
Good question, and one that's hard to answer.
Short answer: the US has lost more astronauts during space missions than the USSR/Russia. According to an airsafe.com article the Soviets lost 4 cosmonauts during space missions. The U.S. lost 7 on Challenger in 1986 and 7 on Columbia (although not all Columbia crewmembers were American).
If you expand the scope of the question to include ground-based deaths in the space and rocketry programs of the U.S. and the USSR then the numbers change dramatically.
The U.S. lost 3 astronauts early in the Apollo program due to a fire in their cabin. The Soviets had a string of ground-based disasters. In 1980 a Vostok rocket exploded on launch, killing 48 people. An even more dramatic failure (cloaked in secrecy for many years) was the October 1960 Nedelin Disaster as part of the Soviet Union's ICBM development program. At least 92 personnel died in the explosion of the R-16 on the launchpad.
As long as there is a star in our Solar system, then SMART 1's mission can last a good while
Unfortunately, however, our solar system contains only one star, meaning that solar powered engines lacked redundancy...
(YES, that's a JOKE...)
It's really a moot point, because most viruses exploit vulnerabilities we don't know about yet.
Sorry, but that statement is just plain wrong. Almost EVERY virus/worm takes advantage of well-publicized vulnerabilities. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the fix is already available well before the virus arrives. Since patches were already available weeks in advance of the first appearance of "in the wild" viral code the recent widespread outbreaks tells us that the problem lies in getting new security patches in place, not in discovering them.
If you are going to teach, teach kids.
I *completely* disagree with you! To say that elderly individuals should not be taught due to their age is appalling. It's not just about giving people skills so that they can give us some sort of economic return later -- it's about improving quality of life. To allow elderly individuals that have little or no mobility to more fully take part in the larger community via the internet is to unshackle them from bodies that may have pretty much abandoned them. Maybe kids will learn more, maybe they'll take the knowledge further, but discarding our elderly as unworthy of learning is a travesty.
How to open a window with a shell prompt:
1. Open Applications | Utilities | Terminal
Lots of other good stuff in Utilities as well...
WiFi is built-in on the Superdrive models (some 15" and all 17"). The combo drive models (12" and some 15") have it as an option. My 15" PowerBook from November had it built-in (again, the Superdrive model).
We have about 350 employees and we are standardizing on Mozilla. Outlook and Internet Explorer are considered VERBOTEN here due to their inherent (and, in our opinion, insurmountable) security risks. You can read our statement regarding the issue on our website:
Why Not IE?
Thanks to our no IE/no Outlook policy we have avoided EVERY major MS email worm outbreak. That means no downtime from the outbreaks, which translates in hours or days of work time not lost. (Compare to MS itself, which seems to lose its email system due to a new worm for at least a couple of days yearly.)
The remotely piloted, one-of-a-kind Helios Prototype crashed off Kauai within the testing area of the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility
Maybe flying it in a missile test range wasn't such a good idea...
No, you wouldn't pay $2000 to "surf the web and check email". If you wanted an Apple you'd spend $800 and get the entry-level eMac (which is what I just bought for my father-in-law). 17" CRT, CD-ROM, 128MB RAM, 800MHz G4 processor. Oh, and if you can get an educational discount it'll cost you even less!
The best part of his new Mac is that his 24/7 tech support person (me) can Secure Shell into his Unix-based system to fix the creative mistakes he makes -- no housecall required!
I think you may be mistaken for taking IBM's lack of vocal response to SCO as "ambivalence". SCO is storming around, yelling and screaming about how Linux and IBM have horribly wronged them. IBM is more professional: they won't posture, but they'll destroy them in the actual fight.
Any time you find yourself in a battle, the more you posture, the more you undermine your position by exposing your weaknesses through your bravado. It is better to approach a battle quietly, and then destroy your opponent completely. IBM knows this.
The biggest point the author appears to be trying to make is that Apple would do better if it was broken into a Apple Software and Apple Hardware. To me, that just seems crazy.
Apple Software would have to compete on x86 hardware for marketshare against Microsoft. I don't think Apple makes any real money on their software: the software gets people to buy their hardware. I think they'd be hard-pressed to compete against MS in this area. Most likely, Apple Software would go the way of Be, Inc.
Apple Hardware would have to go into the x86 PC business and would be competing against Dell and HP/Compaq. Instead of the higher end computers Apple specializes in currently, they'd be forced to compete on that lower end where profits only come through huge sales volumes. Dell would smash them in the hardware market.
No, Apple is a successful niche player because they own the hardware and the software. The seamless integration of the hardware and OS allows the company's products to become "luxury computers". They are a joy to use. Dell makes commodity computers. Apple may have a small marketshare, but so does Jaguar in the car business. Small is fine if your making a profit, something which the current Apple has a good history of doing. Break the company up and I don't see what either piece could do to stay afloat.
The remote-control-via-PDA is a great idea, except that the range on the IR beam from most PDA's is terrible. I tried a similar piece of software on my Palm IIIxe -- the range was only about a meter and a half. Kinda makes it pointless if you have to walk half way across the room to use it.
I did train it to open my wife's Jeep Cherokee, though (that's an IR model remote as well). Newer cars are going RF, so YMMV.
According to the article the answers are:
a) it spins until the tension in the wire counters the rotational force, and
b) the energy comes from the DC voltage they applied to the setup.
ABSOLUTELY! I first saw it when I was a kid -- I cried too! Many years later I made sure my girlfriend (now my wife for many years!) saw it. She said "You didn't tell me it would make me cry!!!"
Oh! And all the spaceships were owned by one of the big airlines from the 60's that is now long since gone, IIRC.