I don't know. When I bought Mac Pro (8 core base model) it was really competitively priced. And even if you are not interested in running OS X, it would be a competitively priced Windows machine as well.
I upgraded it later to nVIDIA Ge8800 GT card, 8 GB of RAM and 2 TB spread over 4 internal hard drives. All for less than $1200 (it would have cost me over $5000 to buy a system like that from Apple).
But everyone knows not to buy upgrades from Apple.
Now MacBook Pro is a little on the pricey side. It costs exactly the same as Mac Pro, but Mac Pro is at least 4 times the computer.
Anyone basing their decision of what computing system to use on commercials (and ones that try to be witty and amusing at all cost) deserves what they get.
I, for one, bought MacPro because I wanted a UNIX system that can run Photoshop and Nikon Capture NX, and Final Cut Pro. I get the beauty of a UNIX system (I spend 90% of my time in terminal) and when I need to edit an image or video I can.
By the way, most Mac users don't find the commercials amusing or truthful (but then again we are not the target audience really).
Yes, but very few people know that Mac Finder will let you tag photos (or any other file for that matter). And the spotlight will let you search on that meta data as well.
Spotlight can already search for all pictures with some pattern in the name and that were created on some date range, and that were taken on some date range at some aperture, specific lens, shutter speed, camera etc...
It's pretty powerful, and it searches images anywhere on any drive.
This is a lot like Aperture or Lightroom. Except I like it better, since I can do spotlight searches on the CLI with
mdfind -interpret "some complex query like above"
and then execute complex command on the results, to archive, open for editing, etc. The possibilities are endless.
And how is disappointment with one program (it's spelled Aperture by the way), translates into not liking the OS and the hardware?
This is just silly. If you are using the Mac, then you don't need aperture nor lightroom, since both try to be image database first and image editing software second.
Mac OS's spotlight does everything Aperture does, and if you create regular backups you are fine.
That is my understanding too. However, it's the APIs around that are not that great. POSIX compliant APIs with all the UNIX commands/utilities and shells would be a lot better in my mind at least.
I really can't use windows without MKS Korn Shell or Cygwin installed. It's hard to get by without find/xargs/grep... and the power of extended regular expressions.
None of the software development is happening in the "vacuum", but is constrained by economics.
There is considerable cost associated with supporting even the previous releases (service packs, hot fixes etc) let alone a completely different code base with people who need to have completely different skill set needed for the old code base.
This really depends on your motive for learning the language.
If your motive is purely pragmatic (you say you want to use the language for doing research) find out which is the second (English will most likely be first) most popular language in which the research papers are published in your field of interest. And then see if you think you would be able to cope with the difficulty in the time you have (what if the language proves to be Japanese?).
If your motive is pure intellectual advancement, then consider learning a complementary language to your native language. English is arguably Germanic language (but lots of words are borrowed from Latin based languages), so a Latin based language like Italian (most similar to Latin), Spanish, Portuguese or French would expand your horizons and make you understand more at abstract level and think more efficiently.
and as we know from history of extinct species, those who could not adapt and change died out and made way for the ones that could.
And the reason Microsoft can't change is because they are catering now to huge bureaucratic corporations (think insurance companies, banks, etc, some of whom are still running Windows NT 4.0), and these are not exactly at the forefront of technological adoption let alone innovation. I.e. they cater to a market that doesn't like change.
If Microsoft decided to do an "apple" and ditch Win32 for solid proven UNIX kernel and build their own APIs around that, these businesses would be creaming bloody murder and literary make Microsoft support their old crud.
Now this could be done through VM these days (but then again most of businesses don't have powerful machines for their users), or perhaps MS could split consumer and business OS further, since consumers are more likely to follow latest trends.
But all this seems to iffy and risky decision for Microsoft to make. So I don't expect any change from them.
I'll agree with your definition of totalitarian communism, but I would not equalize socialism with it.
Also libertarian simply means that one believes that individual rights and freedoms come before the rights and freedoms of the community as whole. So for example restricting what items one can bring on an airplane (taking away of individual freedom) to prevent mid flight terrorist attack (and protect the larger community consisting of people on the flight and possibly ground) is against libertarian view.
However, one can be perfectly libertarian and socialist in outlook. There is nothing wrong with valuing individual rights and freedoms but also supporting national health care and welfare, which are institutions made for the common good. In the end everyone ends up better off with these. Note that these are not rights nor freedoms. These are simply institutions designed to work well for all and not just economic elite.
Look at majority of Western Europe, which is mostly libertarian and socialist esp Scandinavian countries, Austria, France with 5 week vacations, national health care, and individual rights and freedoms.
The guy is charged with felony for selling the vote, yet when the politicians sell the votes of people in bulk to the lobbyists and special interest groups who buy them is not a felony.
Apparently politicians are above all those "people that have died for this country for our right to vote"
but on the other hand Apple's font rendering looks worse than on Linux or even Java's on Mac OS X, and sadly Microsoft is out of their league.
And Mac users that fervently deny there is a problem at all and will gladly bend over and take what ever Apple is giving them, and this will ensure Apple's font rendering stays like this.
So what if OS X does sub-pixel anit-aliasing (which it does)? The end result is that font looks less readable and blurry (esp. black text on white background). I love my mac otherwise, I love the OS (it's UNIX after all), but text rendering is not its forte. Open your terminal (I use the Pro scheme) and turn on font aliasing and use the default Monaco 10pt font. Open a man page: man man for example and look at the letters "m". It is completely blurred and you can't make it out at all.
It's better when I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 12pt, but "g" doesn't look that pretty there either.
lot time ago, but it still doesn't improve the readability of fonts on my macs:D.
Even Joel in the first link you point to above says:
"Apple's fonts are indeed fuzzy, with blurry edges"..
It only goes to show that people will try to explain away the problem. Like I hinted above, I would prefer if the font was forced to the pixel grid and be more readable, rather than staying true to the typeface and have it more blurry.
My g descenders on Mac are always blurry. So is "e" and the only way to get them looking good is to use a huge 16 point and larger font.
There is an interesting interview with Bill Hill (the inventor of Clear Type) here
where he makes a few comments about apple's font rendering. I tend to agree with him from personal experience with both Windows and Mac OS X, and Linux for that matter.
their idea of text smoothing is to apply Gaussian blur to it and smudge it a bit. They do not use advanced manipulation like clear type does.
Clear type plays with the individual RGB levels to effectively triple the resolution available. Typical LCD screen these days has about 101 DPI, so even with clear type you end up with fonts that look as good (or as bad) as 300 DPI laser prints.
Anything less than 600 DPI (which even the cheapest laser printers give you these days) is considered pretty bad resolution. I would not print my resume at anything less than 1600 DPI.
I often hear the argument how the Mac OS X fonts are rendered on screen as they will be printed and how they are optimized for desktop publishing. But this is just a bogus argument and misdirection.
What does reading slashdot in your browser have to do with desktop publishing? Or writing your code.
A desktop publishing application is still free to render its fonts the way it wants to and the way it is appropriate for the application, just like for example Photoshop can render images on screen as they will be printed on paper, not only matching the specific printer profile but also matching the specific paper for that printer.
I know a lot of Mac users are in denial about fonts on Mac, but the first step towards solving the problem is admitting there is a problem.
Microsoft has offered a solution with clear type, which is currently the best solution on the market, and others are free to improve it and make it better. I wish more users would demand this from apple rather than ignoring the problem.
And by the way I use Mac Pro at home, and like it in every way, except for the font rendering. Even Linux is better in this regard.
is desert. It has pleasant mild colors and it distinguishes (by color obviously) between a lot of text objects that other color schemes ignore and paint with the same color.
If you are on Mac and use MacVim you can also make the GUI window transparent (15% works the best) and coupled with blueish wallpaper (like blueberries) works really well.
If you use terminal version of VIM then the number of colors is limited, but I find desert works best in this case as well.
Also, if you don't already have it, try Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font. I believe it is the default system mono font in Linux terminals (at least it is in Fedora Core) and it is very readable and easy on the eyes.
On Windows I also use Consolas and Courier New. But Bitstream works well there too.
Yes, CS does tech you algorithms which is programming exactly. Programming by definition is expression of an algorithm in a formally defined language (which can be anything from English, which is too imprecise but often sufficient to something more formal like Turing Machine).
If you can describe algorithm (i.e. solution to a problem) in plain English or pseudo language, you can program by definition.
It's a small step from there to a formal computer language like C or Java.
it would be more correct to say that programing is based on CS and CS is a branch of mathematics.
Electrical engineering and physics and technology is only needed to make computers, not to program or invent algorithms. Computers don't even have to be "electric".
Most algorithm studies I have done were done on an abstract computer anyway. Mathematicians are amazingly good at creating abstract tools and techniques needed to prove that something will work. Concrete technological realization of their ideas is not of their concern really.
Actually, I would say there is no way to observe it directly unless someone invents a time machine. It does not mean there is no way to observe it indirectly (like majority of other things that we observe by investigating what effects they have on things we can observe) or a way to prove it.
how does this challenge the notion of choice? It's not like your brain is not you.
All this is saying is that we are not conscious of our thought processes, which we also knew and felt for a long time. The thought "computes" in the lower levels and synthesized idea bubbles up to the higher levels where we can verbalize it.
The basic tenet of the evolution theory that organisms change and adapt to their environment has in fact been observed and proven in the lab. It is a repeatable experiment esp. with simpler life forms that live short (like flies).
Your statement "no one was there to observe every stage of evolution" is self contradictory since you are saying that evolution happens but no one observed it.
You see the whole point of evolution is that there are "stages" of change as you put it. No one says that we know them all, nor that we know how something will evolve, just that it will evolve.
That is undeniable fact, except with some fundamentalist religious groups, but facts nor science never stopped them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. When I bought Mac Pro (8 core base model) it was really competitively priced. And even if you are not interested in running OS X, it would be a competitively priced Windows machine as well.
I upgraded it later to nVIDIA Ge8800 GT card, 8 GB of RAM and 2 TB spread over 4 internal hard drives. All for less than $1200 (it would have cost me over $5000 to buy a system like that from Apple).
But everyone knows not to buy upgrades from Apple.
Now MacBook Pro is a little on the pricey side. It costs exactly the same as Mac Pro, but Mac Pro is at least 4 times the computer.
Anyone basing their decision of what computing system to use on commercials (and ones that try to be witty and amusing at all cost) deserves what they get.
I, for one, bought MacPro because I wanted a UNIX system that can run Photoshop and Nikon Capture NX, and Final Cut Pro. I get the beauty of a UNIX system (I spend 90% of my time in terminal) and when I need to edit an image or video I can.
By the way, most Mac users don't find the commercials amusing or truthful (but then again we are not the target audience really).
adding zero to what they were paying him before will give him exact same amount of money as before. Perhaps you meant multiply by ten?
Yes, but very few people know that Mac Finder will let you tag photos (or any other file for that matter). And the spotlight will let you search on that meta data as well.
Spotlight can already search for all pictures with some pattern in the name and that were created on some date range, and that were taken on some date range at some aperture, specific lens, shutter speed, camera etc...
It's pretty powerful, and it searches images anywhere on any drive.
This is a lot like Aperture or Lightroom. Except I like it better, since I can do spotlight searches on the CLI with
mdfind -interpret "some complex query like above"
and then execute complex command on the results, to archive, open for editing, etc. The possibilities are endless.
And how is disappointment with one program (it's spelled Aperture by the way), translates into not liking the OS and the hardware?
This is just silly. If you are using the Mac, then you don't need aperture nor lightroom, since both try to be image database first and image editing software second.
Mac OS's spotlight does everything Aperture does, and if you create regular backups you are fine.
Telecommuting and video conferencing instead of flying is already happening where I work, and it works reasonably well too.
Yeah, that's a good one sentence summary. Double locking indeed.
That is my understanding too. However, it's the APIs around that are not that great. POSIX compliant APIs with all the UNIX commands/utilities and shells would be a lot better in my mind at least.
I really can't use windows without MKS Korn Shell or Cygwin installed. It's hard to get by without find/xargs/grep... and the power of extended regular expressions.
None of the software development is happening in the "vacuum", but is constrained by economics.
There is considerable cost associated with supporting even the previous releases (service packs, hot fixes etc) let alone a completely different code base with people who need to have completely different skill set needed for the old code base.
This really depends on your motive for learning the language.
If your motive is purely pragmatic (you say you want to use the language for doing research) find out which is the second (English will most likely be first) most popular language in which the research papers are published in your field of interest. And then see if you think you would be able to cope with the difficulty in the time you have (what if the language proves to be Japanese?).
If your motive is pure intellectual advancement, then consider learning a complementary language to your native language. English is arguably Germanic language (but lots of words are borrowed from Latin based languages), so a Latin based language like Italian (most similar to Latin), Spanish, Portuguese or French would expand your horizons and make you understand more at abstract level and think more efficiently.
and as we know from history of extinct species, those who could not adapt and change died out and made way for the ones that could.
And the reason Microsoft can't change is because they are catering now to huge bureaucratic corporations (think insurance companies, banks, etc, some of whom are still running Windows NT 4.0), and these are not exactly at the forefront of technological adoption let alone innovation. I.e. they cater to a market that doesn't like change.
If Microsoft decided to do an "apple" and ditch Win32 for solid proven UNIX kernel and build their own APIs around that, these businesses would be creaming bloody murder and literary make Microsoft support their old crud.
Now this could be done through VM these days (but then again most of businesses don't have powerful machines for their users), or perhaps MS could split consumer and business OS further, since consumers are more likely to follow latest trends.
But all this seems to iffy and risky decision for Microsoft to make. So I don't expect any change from them.
I'll agree with your definition of totalitarian communism, but I would not equalize socialism with it.
Also libertarian simply means that one believes that individual rights and freedoms come before the rights and freedoms of the community as whole. So for example restricting what items one can bring on an airplane (taking away of individual freedom) to prevent mid flight terrorist attack (and protect the larger community consisting of people on the flight and possibly ground) is against libertarian view.
However, one can be perfectly libertarian and socialist in outlook. There is nothing wrong with valuing individual rights and freedoms but also supporting national health care and welfare, which are institutions made for the common good. In the end everyone ends up better off with these. Note that these are not rights nor freedoms. These are simply institutions designed to work well for all and not just economic elite.
Look at majority of Western Europe, which is mostly libertarian and socialist esp Scandinavian countries, Austria, France with 5 week vacations, national health care, and individual rights and freedoms.
The guy is charged with felony for selling the vote, yet when the politicians sell the votes of people in bulk to the lobbyists and special interest groups who buy them is not a felony.
Apparently politicians are above all those "people that have died for this country for our right to vote"
Alcohol leaves residue on Aluminium Macs. So I would not do that.
I clean my cameras with alcohol too but the residue is not nearly as visible on my black Nikon cameras.
but on the other hand Apple's font rendering looks worse than on Linux or even Java's on Mac OS X, and sadly Microsoft is out of their league.
And Mac users that fervently deny there is a problem at all and will gladly bend over and take what ever Apple is giving them, and this will ensure Apple's font rendering stays like this.
Sad, because the platform is nice otherwise.
So what if OS X does sub-pixel anit-aliasing (which it does)? The end result is that font looks less readable and blurry (esp. black text on white background). I love my mac otherwise, I love the OS (it's UNIX after all), but text rendering is not its forte. Open your terminal (I use the Pro scheme) and turn on font aliasing and use the default Monaco 10pt font. Open a man page: man man for example and look at the letters "m". It is completely blurred and you can't make it out at all.
It's better when I use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 12pt, but "g" doesn't look that pretty there either.
lot time ago, but it still doesn't improve the readability of fonts on my macs :D.
Even Joel in the first link you point to above says:
"Apple's fonts are indeed fuzzy, with blurry edges"..
It only goes to show that people will try to explain away the problem. Like I hinted above, I would prefer if the font was forced to the pixel grid and be more readable, rather than staying true to the typeface and have it more blurry.
My g descenders on Mac are always blurry. So is "e" and the only way to get them looking good is to use a huge 16 point and larger font.
There is an interesting interview with Bill Hill (the inventor of Clear Type) here
http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/9/4/7/6/4/1/cleartype_2005.wmv
where he makes a few comments about apple's font rendering. I tend to agree with him from personal experience with both Windows and Mac OS X, and Linux for that matter.
their idea of text smoothing is to apply Gaussian blur to it and smudge it a bit. They do not use advanced manipulation like clear type does.
Clear type plays with the individual RGB levels to effectively triple the resolution available. Typical LCD screen these days has about 101 DPI, so even with clear type you end up with fonts that look as good (or as bad) as 300 DPI laser prints.
Anything less than 600 DPI (which even the cheapest laser printers give you these days) is considered pretty bad resolution. I would not print my resume at anything less than 1600 DPI.
I often hear the argument how the Mac OS X fonts are rendered on screen as they will be printed and how they are optimized for desktop publishing. But this is just a bogus argument and misdirection.
What does reading slashdot in your browser have to do with desktop publishing? Or writing your code.
A desktop publishing application is still free to render its fonts the way it wants to and the way it is appropriate for the application, just like for example Photoshop can render images on screen as they will be printed on paper, not only matching the specific printer profile but also matching the specific paper for that printer.
I know a lot of Mac users are in denial about fonts on Mac, but the first step towards solving the problem is admitting there is a problem.
Microsoft has offered a solution with clear type, which is currently the best solution on the market, and others are free to improve it and make it better. I wish more users would demand this from apple rather than ignoring the problem.
And by the way I use Mac Pro at home, and like it in every way, except for the font rendering. Even Linux is better in this regard.
is desert. It has pleasant mild colors and it distinguishes (by color obviously) between a lot of text objects that other color schemes ignore and paint with the same color.
If you are on Mac and use MacVim you can also make the GUI window transparent (15% works the best) and coupled with blueish wallpaper (like blueberries) works really well.
If you use terminal version of VIM then the number of colors is limited, but I find desert works best in this case as well.
Also, if you don't already have it, try Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font. I believe it is the default system mono font in Linux terminals (at least it is in Fedora Core) and it is very readable and easy on the eyes.
On Windows I also use Consolas and Courier New. But Bitstream works well there too.
Yes, CS does tech you algorithms which is programming exactly. Programming by definition is expression of an algorithm in a formally defined language (which can be anything from English, which is too imprecise but often sufficient to something more formal like Turing Machine).
If you can describe algorithm (i.e. solution to a problem) in plain English or pseudo language, you can program by definition.
It's a small step from there to a formal computer language like C or Java.
it would be more correct to say that programing is based on CS and CS is a branch of mathematics.
Electrical engineering and physics and technology is only needed to make computers, not to program or invent algorithms. Computers don't even have to be "electric".
Most algorithm studies I have done were done on an abstract computer anyway. Mathematicians are amazingly good at creating abstract tools and techniques needed to prove that something will work. Concrete technological realization of their ideas is not of their concern really.
My mac pro is 200% cooler than my old PC :D. And quieter too.
Actually, I would say there is no way to observe it directly unless someone invents a time machine. It does not mean there is no way to observe it indirectly (like majority of other things that we observe by investigating what effects they have on things we can observe) or a way to prove it.
For example take a look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcavPAFiG14
which explains general scientific method
And in particular
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w57_P9DZJ4&feature=related
which talks about evolution.
how does this challenge the notion of choice? It's not like your brain is not you.
All this is saying is that we are not conscious of our thought processes, which we also knew and felt for a long time. The thought "computes" in the lower levels and synthesized idea bubbles up to the higher levels where we can verbalize it.
The basic tenet of the evolution theory that organisms change and adapt to their environment has in fact been observed and proven in the lab. It is a repeatable experiment esp. with simpler life forms that live short (like flies).
Your statement "no one was there to observe every stage of evolution" is self contradictory since you are saying that evolution happens but no one observed it.
You see the whole point of evolution is that there are "stages" of change as you put it. No one says that we know them all, nor that we know how something will evolve, just that it will evolve.
That is undeniable fact, except with some fundamentalist religious groups, but facts nor science never stopped them anyway.