Or do they already? If so, I see no mention of this anywhere.
the regulation is necessary...
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 2
... before we can begin using flying ISPs to supply high-bandwidth data streams to remote locales.
And I doubt that we would be using drones for cargo planes -- just modifications to existing autopilot programming that would permit pilotless 747s with optional remote access from a ground based pilot.
Hopefully, they won't be using unencrypted telnet, or we'll have a whole new set of air piracy problems.
... the game has shifted from charging for the code (product of knowledge) as the item being purchased to charging for the knowledge itself.
This is exactly what companies like IBM are doing when they push Linux and a lot of the open source agenda, but also intend to make money by selling services based on their knowledge of the products and ways in which they are used.
IMHO, this is a lot more equitable. You are perfectly free to invest your own time and effort and create your own documentation, or pay to use theirs. In any event, it in no way effects the ability to use the code.
Plus, it provides an economic incentive to support open source. Contrast this with the closed source model, where all the cards are held by the creator of the code, which, coupled with the crazy mania to patent everything under the sun, only serves to raise higher and more formidable barriers to competing products.
This allows the source to remain open, creators/implementors to make a living, and permits competing choices without raising barriers to choice.
let me see if i understand...
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 2
They've managed to create some simple RNA-like code sequences using only two codes. Hence it's a string of bits.
Short RNA sequences have recently been the focus of interest as a potential control mechanism for gene expression (Science Magazine's Highlight Of 2002).
Does this mean that our DNA is being run on a binary RNA VM, and that the Turing test was met before it was described?
Why on earth would millions of businesses, governments, and individuals want to go to all the trouble of migrating billions of documents from PDF (designed for forms and printed documents) to a 'standard' that's best known for making web sites more annoying and slower to load--and is available on fewer platforms?
I believe the answer to this is tied up with the same reasons why millions of people use other Microsoft products. One could ask why people would prefer a bugridden claptrap OS from Redmond over OS/2, which was far and away the better product for many years.
Why don't people look for the best solution to their needs, and instead look to what others are doing?
People don't want multiple platforms -- they want the rest of the world to conform to their own way of doing things. This replays in politics, religion, culture, etc. We're basically herd animals. All that Microsoft has to do is gain a marketplace majority, and the world will bleat a path to their doorstep.
Macintosh and Linux users are basically aberrations, which is why they will always be a minority, no matter how much better their respective systems are.
So if Microsoft can make it less convenient to use PDFs, and more convenient to use MDFs (Microsoft Document Format), and even offer a one-way compatibility to allow PDF users to migrate to MDF without converting, the game is won.
Powerpoint is the Document format of the Future. (puking noises)
A novel way to pay for retirement...
on
When Sysadmins Go Bad
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· Score: 5, Interesting
... pull a stupid crime and spend the rest of your life in a state-funded institution.
It's a little difficult to evaluate the problem-solving capabilities of Speakeasy, because the actual frequency of problems is pretty low.
I moved to Speakeasy and a 144K iDSL line (I know, but it's all I could get at the time) from another ISP with a 128K ISDN line who had been acquired and the new parent then acquired, with definite drops in service with each new owner. I had spent 2 months without service (trying to get a new Toshiba router to work following the demise of my Webramp unit) being bounced between the ISP and Toshiba customer service. Neither one wanted the problem solved, they just wanted me to go away. So I did.
Over the past few years with Speakeasy I have had two problems, one was a telco problem and one was a speakeasy problem. In each case, they took complete control of the problem management, made sure I had access to logs of what was going on and who was expected to do what when, so I always knew what was going on. In one case it was resolved in a matter of hours, in the other it took a couple of days.
I have NEVER had to wait more than a few minutes to talk to a customer service person -- mind you, the times I have needed to do so have been few and far between.
They recently expanded, creating a new POP in the Chicago area (I had previously been served via a POP in the Seattle area). The migration was flawless (from my perspective). They gave all their customers plenty of notice as to what was going to happen and when, then carried it off without a hitch.
I now have additional options -- primarily cable -- that would be much faster and cheaper. I continue to stick with Speakeasy due to their willingness for me to tinker with my own servers, and the fact that for most email and web browsing, faster speeds are not usually much of a benefit. While there are certainly times when they would come in handy (large downloads), I find that probably half or more web sites manage their connection to the lowest common denominator, the 56K modem connection.
In my case, when I look at all the options, having the freedoms afforded me by virtue of being a Speakeasy customer still outweighs the relatively few times I am seriously bandwidth-constrained. On those occasions, I think about getting a cheap cable service just for downloads and web surfing. I'd still run my email through Speakeasy, as they do a very good job of deflecting spam.
... when the applications designs are flawed, turgid chunks of garbage that poorly attempt to mimic a bizarre corporate organizational structure that is changing next week.
Hardware design always has been (and probably always will be) WAY out in front of software design, and yet people are all too willing to spend the odd extra million on hardware while putting as little effort into software as possible.
In most companies they are clutching obsolete applications like life preservers, when in reality they are anchors.
Other VNC servers and clients can be found at: www.realvnc.com
It works, but you'd better be running a 100Mbps LAN with plenty of horsepower on both ends of the connection. OS X is a lotta GUI to be managing remotely.
Humans have a powerful herd instinct. Even if you educate a clueless one as to the reasons why to avoid Microsoft products, all it takes is for them to look around and see everyone else using Windows. The insecurity of "being different" takes over, and they conform to the norm.
If a majority of people inhaled fumes from a chemical device known to be addictive and to eventually cause cancer in the majority of users, there would still be significant demand for the product. Even if only a minority of the population were users of such a product, demand could easily be stimulated by showing attractive role models using the product in magazine and TV ads. Same thing for ingested substances known to destroy brain cells.
Conditioning individuals to see the expected norms as manufacturers want them to see it is the basis for mass market advertising. People are highly susceptible to advertising, and notice how rarely ads emphasize a product's strengths -- almost never -- over associating a product with a desirable situation. All the logic and reason in the world will not prevent a clueless user from being attracted to Windows, when the majority of the world they see uses it.
This applies in spades to decisions made by management or committees, which is why Microsoft and corporate use are synonymous. Linux use in business will never be more than a slim fraction, because of this. If it were otherwise, every corporate desktop would already be a Linux desktop, due to the significant savings that goes right to the bottom line.
If you want someone to use an OS other than Windows, you have only a couple of winning strategies: 1) Make sure that the majority of other users they interact with use your chosen platform, be it Mac, Linux, OS/2, or whatever. They will come to see that as the expected norm and acclimate easily. 2) Have some feature of the non-Windows system you are pushing that either does not exist on Windows, or is so weakly presented that your alternative seems viable to them. This feature must be something your target user sees as a "must-have" capability.
The only reason that Macintosh has any presence in the home market is due to its past dominance in the educational markets carrying over into the home. An example of #2 is the persistence of Macs in the publishing industry due initially to the superior typography and image capabilities, which resulted in the publishing industry getting hooked on Applescript. Today, with similar typographical and image processing capabilities present in Windows, Apple retains the publishing business solely due to the widespread use of Applescript to automate processing. If Microsoft would come out with an Applescript clone, they would own the publishing business inside of 3 years.
People weren't made to think. They are built to follow, and crowd together in herds. Thinking and individualism are abnormal characteristics. Look at what a rousing success Apple's "Think Different" campaign was -- nobody wants to "think differently".
Be thankful you're in a company that has its own IT organization, and not part of an outsourced IT group.
In the outsourced (i.e., contractor) case, you can NEVER refuse work on the grounds that you don't have the people, skills, or any grounds whatsoever. So you end up doing work (poorly) that you lack the skillset to do, on projects that are undocumented and systems you know nothing about, with a degree of understaffing that is ludicrous.
Of course, the end result is crap, but it's crap that you get paid for -- at least over the short haul.
In the longer term, you only breed customer dissatisfaction and unwillingness to pay for more crap. Which of course leads directly back to that same result, less business and mass layoffs.
I believe that the best way to preserve one's own existence is to know a lot of areas at a serviceable (but not excellent!) level. This way you maximize the number of opportunities for work, and yet are not so highly valued/respected so as to pull down the high salary that is as much a bulls-eye for budget-cutters as is the stain of raw untrained potential represented by those who are new to the profession.
Mediocrity is where it's at. Just look at what it's done for those in management.
... on a lot of things. Most significantly, available memory (512M & up recommended) and how much of the video processing can be offloaded onto the graphics chip. If you're thinking about one of the LCD iMacs, you're probably OK, although I'd opt for the top-end configuration due to the 32M VRAM vs 16M in lesser configurations.
In my own usage, I'm running OS X 10.2 on a couple of machines: a 384M Powerbook sporting a 500 MHz G4 (a 67 MHz system bus and 8M of VRAM with an ATI 128 LT-Pro graphics chip are the weak knees in this system), and an ancient 7500 (almost 50 MHz system bus, 512M RAM, a 466 MHz G3 card and an ATI VR128 graphics card, which partially supports Quartz).
Clearly, these are marginal machines -- both officially unsupported for OS X (the Powerbook due to the G4 3rd-party upgrade, and the 7500 because, well, just because). Performance is acceptable, but obviously not what you'd call snappy. But definitely not sluggish. The 7500 runs apache, QuickTime Streaming Server (for streamed video/mp3s), does ipforwarding for other machines on the network, concurrently with a logged-on user surfing the web, with the only casualty being pretty slow network performance for the ipforwarded machines -- but then the ethernet port on the 7500 only supports half duplex operation.
OS X goes overboard (IMHO) with the GUI, from rampant transparency to gratuitous animation. At least you can turn off the animation, and I've tried getting rid of the blended layers, but the performance increase was insufficient (but noticable) to justify dorking up the system that much. But the fact that it is doing SO much with the classy presentation means it will always come in second for any kind of graphics -- at least until the graphics processors are able to take over nearly all of the heavy lifting, which they're getting a lot closer to doing. I wouldn't think of attempting OS X gaming on anything but the latest & greatest hardware.
And one should keep in mind that it IS only a bit over a year old. I'd consider it to be late beta quality code at this point, and if they would focus on polishing it and tightening up the code, it would be nice -- but they keep tweaking the architecture. With 10.2.2, the rumor is they're going to toss in a journalled file system, so don't expect lightning disk I/O for a while.
Lastly, it depends upon what you do with it. Virtual PC operation is abysmally slow under OS X as compared to OS 9, but anything done through the terminal window is plenty quick. Web browsing, document manipulation, and most user-oriented tasks work quite well. Being a Mac, photo and video editing are predictably superior to any other platform, and with OS X you can have a boatload of tasks running in the background as well. As a developer platform, it's a fantastic machine.
One can hope for some typical misguided "innovation" from Mr Bill's hordes of zombie coders -- something that sounds good on the face of it, but only increases the document size and makes it less usable by anything other than Office.
Something like embedding multiple languages into the document via XML tagsets. All you would have to do is select the language to be viewed via the appropriate Office preference setting, and voila!
Of course, the next step (and that's the one where someone should be saying "Sure, we CAN do this, but SHOULD we?") is automatic software translation so that each time a document is created, translations of it spanning the range from Algerian to Zulu are embedded within the document framework. You knew there was a good use for 200G hard drives, right? And with all the fun Microsoft has had with foreign spelling dictionaries over the years, one would expect that they've learned their lesson about doing quality work with language translation...
The clones did not lower the cost of Macs to Apple -- only to consumers. Apple was paying R&D expenses for the cloners -- nearly 100% of the software R&D was paid for by Apple.
The idea was that the existence of cheaper clones would bring over Wintel converts and expand the Macintosh marketplace. Instead of capturing market share from the Wintel world, the clones were cannibalizing Apple's own markets.
So Apple was in the position of subsidizing (via software R&D and product direction) the cloners, only to lose revenue to them. Apple and the cloners cannot both survive in such a scenario.
While it would have been nice for Apple to have been able to support a clone market segment (I bought a very nice Power Computing box that still works today), it just didn't work out.
And I don't mean to portray this as an entirely civil business decision -- the manner in which Apple backed out of their stated position of supporting a clone market for Macs was pretty slimy. But in hindsight it was necessary to save the company.
Macs have a lot of problems (the most significant of which will hopefully be solved by getting away from Motorola cpus) to go with their strengths, but the existence of a clone market never helps strengthen a company. Look at what happened to IBM in the PC business. If IBM did not have other product lines to carry their perennially money-losing PC business, there would be no Thinkpads today.
The recent spate of problems with Chimera crashing turns out to be (at least in part) due to a Flash plugin bug. Fixed with the (currently beta) Flash plugin 6.0-r60 --
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/spe cial/beta/
in a press release by the Office of Homeland Defense, it was announced that an insidious plot by hacker terrorists had been thwarted. It seems that this subversive web site, www.slashdot.org, would trigger random DDOS attacks on targets identified on their web site. It has yet to be ascertained what their intent was, as no logical pattern has been detected. The investigation continues.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone. I certainly hope the filters used to detect true DDOS attacks are effective enough to prevent this scenario.
My experiences with the domestic US Citibank site have been VERY good. I've used NS 4.7, NS 7.1, several versions of Mozilla (as I recall, it was not well supported until the later 0.9.x versions, but has worked perfectly for a long while now), and Chimera, as well IE. They responded in a civil manner when I complained about early Mozilla versions not being supported (bad javascript on their part), and actually eventually got around to fixing it.
In addition to scoring very high in most magazine rankings, year in and year out, they continue to improve their site. The most recent changes actually eliminated a lot of distracting ads, as well as making significant operational improvements.
And no, I don't work for them. But I think they do a hell of a nice job.
Quite a number of diseases exist because they can exist in animal populations, crossing back into human populations every now and then. We get a number of new diseases this way anyhow. Ever hear of HIV? Originated in monkey populations, made its way into the human population. How about Swine Flu? Hoof and mouth disease? Mad Cow disease? It's hard to think of a disease that lives solely in human populations -- because we can wipe those out.
This isn't really an insidious "new" way for diseases to come about - it's the rule rather than the exception.
And while it's probably the researchers' number one concern, it's not a reason to abandon the line of research, only a reason to exercise appropriate caution. You might feel differently about this if you were awaiting a transplant.
While I am in complete agreement that it was originally done this way in the interests of expediency, we can all see a point very soon where the instruction set will be in a (minor/major?) state of upheaval -- when they revamp OS X for 64-bit operation on the IBM 970 chipset.
However, it's not quite as easy as rolling it into that architecture, as they wil probably rely of the 32-bit PPC compatibility mode of the 970 to bring along a lot of the existing baggage, ruling out a wholesale conversion to another API. Which means they will either implement a foundation to migrate toward the new API, or invoke yet another API (probably 64-bit 970 only) that uses the appropriate model. Either way, it will be some years (if ever, as we can still code 68X apps using an API from decades ago that run under emulation on OS X) before we see an efficient API in widespread use.
In any event, they will certainly retain a CISC-oriented API in the OS X stable of architectures, if only to be able to continue to wave the specter of an open source OS X on X86 in front of Microsoft, as sort of a "mutual assured destruction" weapon to prevent Microsoft from wiping them out, and possibly as a negotiating tool in keeping Microsoft coding for the Mac.
But -- since Apple is pretty well (apparently) hamstrung on making great strides in hardware performance over the next year or so, maybe they will push the software changes as the next best way to get needed speed. It wouldn't be the first time Apple capriciously honked off developers by changing all the rules and rendering years of development obsolete.
And the whole thing may be moot, as it appears that one can get equivalent performance improvement by compiling with gcc3.
Try and actually DO the calculation you're quoting before you type. Let's try a simple thought experiment: 1-bit word -- can hold 2 values (0,1), or 2**1 2-bit word -- can hold 4 values (0,1,2,3), or 2**2 16-bit word -- 2**16 = 65,536 -- which is 64K, NOT 64M
I think the home brew railgun described in Slashdot 2002-03-01 would make a lot of kids think about how it works and maybe even lead them into a little mathematical thought, concerning the cascading of the accumulated momentum across the stages of the device.
It might open one or two students' minds to some of the notions of finite math and calculus, which would be a bonus. Plenty of opportunities to use a simple spreadsheet model to calculate the kinetic energy from the final stage.
Most students would benefit from a practical analysis of Newton's Laws of Motion, and this is an excellent opportunity to relate mathematics to the visceral impact of ball bearings shooting through 2x4's.
Don't forget to film it for later analysis and instant replays, as you probably don't want to be shooting high-velocity projectiles in close proximity to the students very often.
Slashdot Mirror
So when are the iPods going to support it?
At least the AAC portion of Apple's MPEG4...
Or do they already? If so, I see no mention of this anywhere.
... before we can begin using flying ISPs to supply high-bandwidth data streams to remote locales.
And I doubt that we would be using drones for cargo planes -- just modifications to existing autopilot programming that would permit pilotless 747s with optional remote access from a ground based pilot.
Hopefully, they won't be using unencrypted telnet, or we'll have a whole new set of air piracy problems.
... the game has shifted from charging for the code (product of knowledge) as the item being purchased to charging for the knowledge itself.
This is exactly what companies like IBM are doing when they push Linux and a lot of the open source agenda, but also intend to make money by selling services based on their knowledge of the products and ways in which they are used.
IMHO, this is a lot more equitable. You are perfectly free to invest your own time and effort and create your own documentation, or pay to use theirs. In any event, it in no way effects the ability to use the code.
Plus, it provides an economic incentive to support open source. Contrast this with the closed source model, where all the cards are held by the creator of the code, which, coupled with the crazy mania to patent everything under the sun, only serves to raise higher and more formidable barriers to competing products.
This allows the source to remain open, creators/implementors to make a living, and permits competing choices without raising barriers to choice.
They've managed to create some simple RNA-like code sequences using only two codes. Hence it's a string of bits.
Short RNA sequences have recently been the focus of interest as a potential control mechanism for gene expression (Science Magazine's Highlight Of 2002).
Does this mean that our DNA is being run on a binary RNA VM, and that the Turing test was met before it was described?
Why on earth would millions of businesses, governments, and individuals want to go to all the trouble of migrating billions of documents from PDF (designed for forms and printed documents) to a 'standard' that's best known for making web sites more annoying and slower to load--and is available on fewer platforms?
I believe the answer to this is tied up with the same reasons why millions of people use other Microsoft products. One could ask why people would prefer a bugridden claptrap OS from Redmond over OS/2, which was far and away the better product for many years.
Why don't people look for the best solution to their needs, and instead look to what others are doing?
People don't want multiple platforms -- they want the rest of the world to conform to their own way of doing things. This replays in politics, religion, culture, etc. We're basically herd animals. All that Microsoft has to do is gain a marketplace majority, and the world will bleat a path to their doorstep.
Macintosh and Linux users are basically aberrations, which is why they will always be a minority, no matter how much better their respective systems are.
So if Microsoft can make it less convenient to use PDFs, and more convenient to use MDFs (Microsoft Document Format), and even offer a one-way compatibility to allow PDF users to migrate to MDF without converting, the game is won.
Powerpoint is the Document format of the Future. (puking noises)
... pull a stupid crime and spend the rest of your life in a state-funded institution.
... that they wouldn't sack any of us until after the 1st of the year.
It's a little difficult to evaluate the problem-solving capabilities of Speakeasy, because the actual frequency of problems is pretty low.
I moved to Speakeasy and a 144K iDSL line (I know, but it's all I could get at the time) from another ISP with a 128K ISDN line who had been acquired and the new parent then acquired, with definite drops in service with each new owner. I had spent 2 months without service (trying to get a new Toshiba router to work following the demise of my Webramp unit) being bounced between the ISP and Toshiba customer service. Neither one wanted the problem solved, they just wanted me to go away. So I did.
Over the past few years with Speakeasy I have had two problems, one was a telco problem and one was a speakeasy problem. In each case, they took complete control of the problem management, made sure I had access to logs of what was going on and who was expected to do what when, so I always knew what was going on. In one case it was resolved in a matter of hours, in the other it took a couple of days.
I have NEVER had to wait more than a few minutes to talk to a customer service person -- mind you, the times I have needed to do so have been few and far between.
They recently expanded, creating a new POP in the Chicago area (I had previously been served via a POP in the Seattle area). The migration was flawless (from my perspective). They gave all their customers plenty of notice as to what was going to happen and when, then carried it off without a hitch.
I now have additional options -- primarily cable -- that would be much faster and cheaper. I continue to stick with Speakeasy due to their willingness for me to tinker with my own servers, and the fact that for most email and web browsing, faster speeds are not usually much of a benefit. While there are certainly times when they would come in handy (large downloads), I find that probably half or more web sites manage their connection to the lowest common denominator, the 56K modem connection.
In my case, when I look at all the options, having the freedoms afforded me by virtue of being a Speakeasy customer still outweighs the relatively few times I am seriously bandwidth-constrained. On those occasions, I think about getting a cheap cable service just for downloads and web surfing. I'd still run my email through Speakeasy, as they do a very good job of deflecting spam.
Why not Jodie Foster? She did an excellent job in Contact, and this is a similar kind of role.
... when the applications designs are flawed, turgid chunks of garbage that poorly attempt to mimic a bizarre corporate organizational structure that is changing next week.
Hardware design always has been (and probably always will be) WAY out in front of software design, and yet people are all too willing to spend the odd extra million on hardware while putting as little effort into software as possible.
In most companies they are clutching obsolete applications like life preservers, when in reality they are anchors.
long term... is that two quarters or three?
here's a link for the only OS X VNC server that I know of:
http://www.redstonesoftware.com/osxvnc/
Other VNC servers and clients can be found at:
www.realvnc.com
It works, but you'd better be running a 100Mbps LAN with plenty of horsepower on both ends of the connection. OS X is a lotta GUI to be managing remotely.
Humans have a powerful herd instinct. Even if you educate a clueless one as to the reasons why to avoid Microsoft products, all it takes is for them to look around and see everyone else using Windows. The insecurity of "being different" takes over, and they conform to the norm.
If a majority of people inhaled fumes from a chemical device known to be addictive and to eventually cause cancer in the majority of users, there would still be significant demand for the product. Even if only a minority of the population were users of such a product, demand could easily be stimulated by showing attractive role models using the product in magazine and TV ads. Same thing for ingested substances known to destroy brain cells.
Conditioning individuals to see the expected norms as manufacturers want them to see it is the basis for mass market advertising. People are highly susceptible to advertising, and notice how rarely ads emphasize a product's strengths -- almost never -- over associating a product with a desirable situation. All the logic and reason in the world will not prevent a clueless user from being attracted to Windows, when the majority of the world they see uses it.
This applies in spades to decisions made by management or committees, which is why Microsoft and corporate use are synonymous. Linux use in business will never be more than a slim fraction, because of this. If it were otherwise, every corporate desktop would already be a Linux desktop, due to the significant savings that goes right to the bottom line.
If you want someone to use an OS other than Windows, you have only a couple of winning strategies:
1) Make sure that the majority of other users they interact with use your chosen platform, be it Mac, Linux, OS/2, or whatever. They will come to see that as the expected norm and acclimate easily.
2) Have some feature of the non-Windows system you are pushing that either does not exist on Windows, or is so weakly presented that your alternative seems viable to them. This feature must be something your target user sees as a "must-have" capability.
The only reason that Macintosh has any presence in the home market is due to its past dominance in the educational markets carrying over into the home. An example of #2 is the persistence of Macs in the publishing industry due initially to the superior typography and image capabilities, which resulted in the publishing industry getting hooked on Applescript. Today, with similar typographical and image processing capabilities present in Windows, Apple retains the publishing business solely due to the widespread use of Applescript to automate processing. If Microsoft would come out with an Applescript clone, they would own the publishing business inside of 3 years.
People weren't made to think. They are built to follow, and crowd together in herds. Thinking and individualism are abnormal characteristics. Look at what a rousing success Apple's "Think Different" campaign was -- nobody wants to "think differently".
The nail that stands up gets hammered down.
It's how we're made.
Be thankful you're in a company that has its own IT organization, and not part of an outsourced IT group.
In the outsourced (i.e., contractor) case, you can NEVER refuse work on the grounds that you don't have the people, skills, or any grounds whatsoever. So you end up doing work (poorly) that you lack the skillset to do, on projects that are undocumented and systems you know nothing about, with a degree of understaffing that is ludicrous.
Of course, the end result is crap, but it's crap that you get paid for -- at least over the short haul.
In the longer term, you only breed customer dissatisfaction and unwillingness to pay for more crap. Which of course leads directly back to that same result, less business and mass layoffs.
I believe that the best way to preserve one's own existence is to know a lot of areas at a serviceable (but not excellent!) level. This way you maximize the number of opportunities for work, and yet are not so highly valued/respected so as to pull down the high salary that is as much a bulls-eye for budget-cutters as is the stain of raw untrained potential represented by those who are new to the profession.
Mediocrity is where it's at. Just look at what it's done for those in management.
... on a lot of things. Most significantly, available memory (512M & up recommended) and how much of the video processing can be offloaded onto the graphics chip. If you're thinking about one of the LCD iMacs, you're probably OK, although I'd opt for the top-end configuration due to the 32M VRAM vs 16M in lesser configurations.
In my own usage, I'm running OS X 10.2 on a couple of machines: a 384M Powerbook sporting a 500 MHz G4 (a 67 MHz system bus and 8M of VRAM with an ATI 128 LT-Pro graphics chip are the weak knees in this system), and an ancient 7500 (almost 50 MHz system bus, 512M RAM, a 466 MHz G3 card and an ATI VR128 graphics card, which partially supports Quartz).
Clearly, these are marginal machines -- both officially unsupported for OS X (the Powerbook due to the G4 3rd-party upgrade, and the 7500 because, well, just because). Performance is acceptable, but obviously not what you'd call snappy. But definitely not sluggish. The 7500 runs apache, QuickTime Streaming Server (for streamed video/mp3s), does ipforwarding for other machines on the network, concurrently with a logged-on user surfing the web, with the only casualty being pretty slow network performance for the ipforwarded machines -- but then the ethernet port on the 7500 only supports half duplex operation.
OS X goes overboard (IMHO) with the GUI, from rampant transparency to gratuitous animation. At least you can turn off the animation, and I've tried getting rid of the blended layers, but the performance increase was insufficient (but noticable) to justify dorking up the system that much. But the fact that it is doing SO much with the classy presentation means it will always come in second for any kind of graphics -- at least until the graphics processors are able to take over nearly all of the heavy lifting, which they're getting a lot closer to doing. I wouldn't think of attempting OS X gaming on anything but the latest & greatest hardware.
And one should keep in mind that it IS only a bit over a year old. I'd consider it to be late beta quality code at this point, and if they would focus on polishing it and tightening up the code, it would be nice -- but they keep tweaking the architecture. With 10.2.2, the rumor is they're going to toss in a journalled file system, so don't expect lightning disk I/O for a while.
Lastly, it depends upon what you do with it. Virtual PC operation is abysmally slow under OS X as compared to OS 9, but anything done through the terminal window is plenty quick. Web browsing, document manipulation, and most user-oriented tasks work quite well. Being a Mac, photo and video editing are predictably superior to any other platform, and with OS X you can have a boatload of tasks running in the background as well. As a developer platform, it's a fantastic machine.
One can hope for some typical misguided "innovation" from Mr Bill's hordes of zombie coders -- something that sounds good on the face of it, but only increases the document size and makes it less usable by anything other than Office.
Something like embedding multiple languages into the document via XML tagsets. All you would have to do is select the language to be viewed via the appropriate Office preference setting, and voila!
Of course, the next step (and that's the one where someone should be saying "Sure, we CAN do this, but SHOULD we?") is automatic software translation so that each time a document is created, translations of it spanning the range from Algerian to Zulu are embedded within the document framework. You knew there was a good use for 200G hard drives, right? And with all the fun Microsoft has had with foreign spelling dictionaries over the years, one would expect that they've learned their lesson about doing quality work with language translation...
The clones did not lower the cost of Macs to Apple -- only to consumers. Apple was paying R&D expenses for the cloners -- nearly 100% of the software R&D was paid for by Apple.
The idea was that the existence of cheaper clones would bring over Wintel converts and expand the Macintosh marketplace. Instead of capturing market share from the Wintel world, the clones were cannibalizing Apple's own markets.
So Apple was in the position of subsidizing (via software R&D and product direction) the cloners, only to lose revenue to them. Apple and the cloners cannot both survive in such a scenario.
While it would have been nice for Apple to have been able to support a clone market segment (I bought a very nice Power Computing box that still works today), it just didn't work out.
And I don't mean to portray this as an entirely civil business decision -- the manner in which Apple backed out of their stated position of supporting a clone market for Macs was pretty slimy. But in hindsight it was necessary to save the company.
Macs have a lot of problems (the most significant of which will hopefully be solved by getting away from Motorola cpus) to go with their strengths, but the existence of a clone market never helps strengthen a company. Look at what happened to IBM in the PC business. If IBM did not have other product lines to carry their perennially money-losing PC business, there would be no Thinkpads today.
The recent spate of problems with Chimera crashing turns out to be (at least in part) due to a Flash plugin bug. Fixed with the (currently beta) Flash plugin 6.0-r60 --e cial/beta/
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/sp
in a press release by the Office of Homeland Defense, it was announced that an insidious plot by hacker terrorists had been thwarted. It seems that this subversive web site, www.slashdot.org, would trigger random DDOS attacks on targets identified on their web site. It has yet to be ascertained what their intent was, as no logical pattern has been detected. The investigation continues.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
I certainly hope the filters used to detect true DDOS attacks are effective enough to prevent this scenario.
My experiences with the domestic US Citibank site have been VERY good. I've used NS 4.7, NS 7.1, several versions of Mozilla (as I recall, it was not well supported until the later 0.9.x versions, but has worked perfectly for a long while now), and Chimera, as well IE. They responded in a civil manner when I complained about early Mozilla
versions not being supported (bad javascript on their part), and actually eventually got around to fixing it.
In addition to scoring very high in most magazine rankings, year in and year out, they continue to improve their site. The most recent changes actually eliminated a lot of distracting ads, as well as making significant operational improvements.
And no, I don't work for them. But I think they do a hell of a nice job.
Quite a number of diseases exist because they can exist in animal populations, crossing back into human populations every now and then. We get a number of new diseases this way anyhow. Ever hear of HIV? Originated in monkey populations, made its way into the human population. How about Swine Flu? Hoof and mouth disease? Mad Cow disease? It's hard to think of a disease that lives solely in human populations -- because we can wipe those out.
This isn't really an insidious "new" way for diseases to come about - it's the rule rather than the exception.
And while it's probably the researchers' number one concern, it's not a reason to abandon the line of research, only a reason to exercise appropriate caution. You might feel differently about this if you were awaiting a transplant.
While I am in complete agreement that it was originally done this way in the interests of expediency, we can all see a point very soon where the instruction set will be in a (minor/major?) state of upheaval -- when they revamp OS X for 64-bit operation on the IBM 970 chipset.
However, it's not quite as easy as rolling it into that architecture, as they wil probably rely of the 32-bit PPC compatibility mode of the 970 to bring along a lot of the existing baggage, ruling out a wholesale conversion to another API. Which means they will either implement a foundation to migrate toward the new API, or invoke yet another API (probably 64-bit 970 only) that uses the appropriate model. Either way, it will be some years (if ever, as we can still code 68X apps using an API from decades ago that run under emulation on OS X) before we see an efficient API in widespread use.
In any event, they will certainly retain a CISC-oriented API in the OS X stable of architectures, if only to be able to continue to wave the specter of an open source OS X on X86 in front of Microsoft, as sort of a "mutual assured destruction" weapon to prevent Microsoft from wiping them out, and possibly as a negotiating tool in keeping Microsoft coding for the Mac.
But -- since Apple is pretty well (apparently) hamstrung on making great strides in hardware performance over the next year or so, maybe they will push the software changes as the next best way to get needed speed. It wouldn't be the first time Apple capriciously honked off developers by changing all the rules and rendering years of development obsolete.
And the whole thing may be moot, as it appears that one can get equivalent performance improvement by compiling with gcc3.
PUL-LEASE !! PEOPLE !!
Try and actually DO the calculation you're quoting before you type. Let's try a simple thought experiment:
1-bit word -- can hold 2 values (0,1), or 2**1
2-bit word -- can hold 4 values (0,1,2,3), or 2**2
16-bit word -- 2**16 = 65,536 -- which is 64K, NOT 64M
It might open one or two students' minds to some of the notions of finite math and calculus, which would be a bonus. Plenty of opportunities to use a simple spreadsheet model to calculate the kinetic energy from the final stage.
Most students would benefit from a practical analysis of Newton's Laws of Motion, and this is an excellent opportunity to relate mathematics to the visceral impact of ball bearings shooting through 2x4's.
Don't forget to film it for later analysis and instant replays, as you probably don't want to be shooting high-velocity projectiles in close proximity to the students very often.
and to think that all this time I had believed it to be some variant of hip-hop for toads...