TeX is Obtuse and used by people who need it because other applications don't do what they need (that's how it came to exist in the first place!).
You can't get within spitting distance of academia without acquiring at least a basic understanding of Office.
If the features perform reliably and as advertised, then it's a matter of Academicians extending their Office knowledge. You won't have to learn two apps if you don't want to.
People familiar with TeX will almost certainly keep using it; new users will probably go with Office since they already have it and know it to some extent.
That or Microsoft will make the feature implementation so horrifically obtuse (just like the rest of the application suite!) and Academia will stick with TeX because their old docs work with it (always important) and it's - GASP! - easier to use than whatever Microsoft is trying to jam down their throats.
Bottom line, MS is very, very late to the party on this one... and if it weren't the fact that you can't function in Academia without Office (or semi-regular access to a computer with Office), I doubt anyone would notice. Or care.
Risky? Courts in the EU are a lot saner than their US counterparts. Don't want to get slapped with antitrust fines? Obey the law. Really. It's not hard. Sell a better product at a lower price, for example.
Have you seen American business practices lately? That is risky - especially when the.eu won't be granting you billions in cash when the bottom falls out of your broke-ass business plan.
There are a few applications I prefer either single-cored or with limited memory access. After Effects, for example, is so incredibly poorly behaved on the Mac that I'd rather use version 6 - which can only see around 1.5 gigs of ram - than 7 or higher, which can see much more. In my experience it's made almost no difference on rendering time - where it DOES make a difference is in wether or not I'm actually able to use my machine for anything else while the render is grinding.
Of course, you can tell 7+ how much ram to use (same as photoshop), but in my experience these applications willfully ignore user input and treat the machine they're running on as if it exists for that application and that application only.
I'm all for getting the most out of my hardware - but given the choice between an application being a dick about hogging the box and an earlier version that "knows how to share," I'm going to be running the version that gives me the most responsive machine. If that version is multithreaded, great! If it isn't.... well, more CPU for other apps.
The one chunk of IRIX that IMO might still be relevant - the thing you got without having to install over a gig of GPL software - was XFS, and that has been GPLed.
The only advantage I could see to opening IRIX would be in getting a peek under the hood to figure out how to get the framebuffers on the MIPS kit to work with the various freenix distros that run on MIPS. My extremely brief stint with IRIX was spent getting a variety of GPL software (from SSH to the GIMP to Mozilla, etc) up and running under some variant of 6.5. I found the then-current state of linux to be greatly superior in almost every respect. The only advantage of desktop IRIX was the framebuffer support.
The server end, I can't speak on. There may be some benefit there. Otherwise, your target market is a very small market of hobbyists.:)
Less "Get Smart," more Dune...
on
Cone of Silence 2.0
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's been a ridiculously long time since I read Frank Herbert's Dune (or any of its sequels), but I remember at least one of the books had a couple of scenes with a "cone of silence" much along these lines.
Anyone inside the field could communicate with each other; anyone outside the field couldn't hear them. For added security, the conversants would face the inner wall (iirc the "cone of silence" was walled on three sides) to prevent lip-reading - something that this approach to the idea doesn't cover.
Of course, there's nothing preventing you from simply holding your hand over your mouth...
The orbital period of these exoplanets make Mercury's 88 day loop seem positively sluggish by comparison. The rest of the planets in our system have much longer orbital periods - Earth's is a bit over four times mercury's - to say nothing of the geologic sloth of the outer planets.
That said, from what I know about gravitational microlensing (very little, admittedly), it makes sense that our existing telescopes are picking up a lot of "high speed" planets, and that it's going to take a long time (both in ramping up the tech and in tasking the scope to just sit there and stare at a star, waiting for something to blip by) for the "earth-sized rock in the habitable zone with an earth-length orbital period!" announcements to start rolling in.
That they're catching them smaller is fantastic. I look forward to the scopes catching 'em slower.:)
As somebody who either has an excruciatingly difficult time reading the damned things, or - more frequently - being completely unable to read them at all, I for one welcome the day when captchas are relegated to the dustbin of history.
Seriously. I'd love to just be able to download porn without having to take a screenshot of the browser and then dick around in photoshop for a few minutes (brightness/contrast, pen tool, etc) in order for megaupload or whatever to let me get at the goodies.
I have a hard enough time with normal-shaped words, dammit. This captcha crap is inhumane, and I can't wait to be rid of it. If smarter bot software is what it takes, then so be it - hell, I'd pay for that kind of software, just so I don't have to deal with the damned inconvenience anymore.
Yeah, I tossed it.:-| I was moving at the time and had piles and piles of crap to get rid of, so everything that wasn't 100% functional got the boot. I did try to repair it, though - unfortunately, the problem seemed to be circuitry-related, not mechanical.
(didn't help that the board was filthy on the inside...)
It was an EXCELLENT keyboard up until about eight months ago when the space bar stopped working. Hard thing to live without, a space bar.
Since I didn't (and still don't) have the fun money for a new one, I've switched to one of the new thin apple keyboards. They get the job done - they're nowhere near as much fun to use as the Tactile Pro, but they suck less than all of the previous Apple USB keyboards. Which admittedly isn't saying much - all previous Apple boards were some variation of passive aggressive mashed potatoes.... including the one I'm using now (at work), which is occasionally a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
The only thing I didn't like about the Matias was the hair-trigger caps lock key - for a company claiming the best Mac board since the Apple Extended// (which was a FANTASTIC keyboard, the closest thing Apple's ever come to a Model M), you'd think they'd have implemented the AE2's "press it and it stays down" caps lock key.
Dammit, now I'm missing mine.:( Time to start saving up the beer money again...
No user-visible drivers. No having to update each individual component of the system (sound driver, video driver, wireless driver, bluetooth driver, usb driver, ethernet driver, firewire driver, keyboard layout, mouse driver, etc) by downloading files from a dozen different websites. Boot up and go.
Yeah, that stuff is there, and increasingly less necessary even if you're one of the few who shell out for a Mac Pro for the expandability.... but all of the base hardware works fully and completely right out of the box. Hell, they even include windows drivers.
Just one nit - on the current OS X (10.5), you can't run ten year old browsers.... unless you're running linux or windows in a VM. The Classic MacOS stuff just doesn't run anymore.
MacOS, MacOS X, and the reasonably consumer-friendly linux distros can all give the user a decent internet experience without having to wear ten condoms and a hazmat suit.
Windows, not so much.
When given the choice between "no effort" and "somebody's idea of common sense" to staunch the flow of software-AIDS from spraying out of the pipe, which do you think the majority is going to choose?
I'm not going to run windows just for "the best web browser." They want to resurrect the Mac IE port, I'm all for that - IE 5 for the Mac was the best browser on the platform until Mozilla came along.
It doesn't matter how "good" IE8 is - it's windows only, and Windows + Internet == Screaming Assrape. While I run windows at home and at work for non-Mac apps, I don't connect to the internet with my windows machines. I don't use samba (I use an SCP client which is slower but imo less of an asspain than windows networking), I don't download anything, and I damn sure don't install anything that didn't come from a vendor disk.
End result : exponentially fewer security problems than friends who run XP on their wintendos.
IE8 could give me winning lottery numbers and blow jobs... but I'm not running a web browser on Windows, ever. It's like having sex without a condom at an STD conference.
I'm in Pittsburgh, where this sort of behavior happens on wide open intersections all the time - most notably (for me, anyway) at Forbes and Craig, which is in no way at all a blind intersection.
This is also notably a problem with the bus lane on the birmingham bridge - cars will stop a full length or two over the white line they're supposed to stop at, then honk loudly and scream like ignorant pissants when a bus lurches off of the bridge and "blocks them" as the bus is trying to make its turn.
The issue isn't just "pedestrians are douchebags"* It's that motorists are also douchebags. Douchebags with air conditioning and horns. And while this kind of behavior is irritating for a pedestrian, I CAN just walk around it or hop over the hood. A vehicle trying to turn onto the street you're BLOCKING by having stopped on the crosswalk doesn't have that luxury, and is going to cause more of a traffic mess by trying to get around your inconsiderate ass than I would by double-timing it out of the way of an incoming bus.
Idiot pedestrians are a problem for motorists. Idiot motorists are a problem for pedestrians and other motorists, and such inconsiderate behavior should be penalized.
* as one, I still have no love for the herds that clog Forbes and Bigelow every day, slowing traffic to a crawl. Bad (pedestrian) traffic design, that.
I'm a lifelong pedestrian. Running red lights, gunning it on yellow, and the Pittsburgh left don't bother me. What bugs me is the endless supply of $%$#%@! who stop at a red light ON THE CROSSWALK, instead of at the line well behind it. This behavior forces those of us who are on foot to either walk behind the offender, or worse (when the offender realizes their mistake, tries to back up, and the car behind them just Does Not Care), walk out into traffic.
Find a way to ticket THESE idiots for being a public nuisance. You'll make the pedestrians happy and you'll be rolling in dough.:P
I have a Canon Powershot A95. It's getting long in the tooth and is due for replacement whenever I can afford something better*.... over its service life, I've had one GLARING problem with it - with the flash off, under the camera's idea of low-light conditions, I have to take five, ten, two dozen pictures using various auto-mode settings to get something that's even moderately focused. It's fine for broad daylight outdoors, but indoors or starting at dusk outside, it's extremely frustrating to use.
Half that is, admittedly, dumbassery on my part. The other half has hopefully been fixed with newer camera technology.
I'd like to take one picture, in focus, and move on. Failing that, I'd like the response time to be fast enough that I can switch through modes and take pictures of moving objects while they're still in range!
* I can get "better" in almost every respect for much less than I paid for the A95. But if I want the Killer Feature - the flippy LCD screen - then a new camera is going to cost me about the same as the old one ($300+).
... isn't some developer's idea of benchmarks, but estimates based on actual Real World Use.
For example - my laptop* will last a day or two unplugged in sleep mode. There's one metric for you - how long will it last if you stick it in your bag and forget about it?
My laptop will last maybe an hour - if that - running Photoshop. That stresses the disk, the ram, pegs the processor, etc.
It might last through a DVD if I'm not doing anything else. Optical drive is the big drain here - newer machines can handle the rest while barely ticking over.
Slurping a bigass (4+ gig) video file off of a thumb drive through a USB1 port completely drained the battery. That's sustained, heavy use of ports and disk.
Ultimately, I don't care how long the laptop battery lasts with "average use." I care about how well it holds up to the very extremes - extreme neglect (how long can it sleep on a full or moderate charge?), regular-for-me use (fullbore photoshop until the charge meter hits red), and Worst Case Scenario (I'm in the middle of the country trying to get all of my critical files copied onto my ipod or other laptop-powered USB drive).
Apple's battery monitoring software gives a fairly accurate, frequently updated guesstimate of battery time remaining and charge time remaining - and you're only going to get those figures through stressing the machine the way you'll be using it - not through skimming the interwebs for benchmarks that care deeply about ways you'll never use the hardware.
In my opinion, it may be easier to develop better battery monitors than it will be to develop and publish accurate test suites.
* An old 12" Powerbook G4 that's way past its prime. Newer lappies will get longer life for these scenarios but I think they stand as ballpark figures.
... look forward to the day when Space sets the national agenda in the Hearts And Minds, as it did during Kennedy's term in office.
NASA gets 18 billion and change this year.
The DOD got over 400 billion in discretionary spending in 2008.
I called my dad on the anniversary of Apollo 8, We talked about how he'd heard the broadcast in his youth, the state of the space program and the future of manned spaceflight. He's of the opinion that the next boots on the moon will be Chinese. I'd prefer to think otherwise... but he thought Ellen Tigh was a Cylon at her very first appearance... and hey, they need it more than we do.
More money for Space is always a good thing. Look at what NASA has given Americans in terms of national pride and the world in terms of scientific advances.... then look at the price tage of the Joint Strike Fighter and its price/performance ratio compared to current ready-to-fly equipment. Look at the price tag of our post-Clinton "nation building." Tell me the world wouldn't benefit more from NASA being tossed, say... an eighth of the DOD budget.
Hell, for the price of invading Iraq we could be holding national lotteries to see who gets to be on the next colony ship to MARS.
Our only hope as a species is to get off of this rock before we turn it into Venus Junior. The only agencies that can get us there - Roscosmos, NASA - can't even begin to try for lack of adequate funding.
Which, ultimately, stems from lack of adequate political incentive.
In terms of securing a future for the species, every dollar spent on NASA increases our chances more than any 100 million spent on "defense" (from what? Asteroids? Global warming? Some kind of superflu?). Unfortunately, that money isn't going to be spent until every television channel and radio station is broadcasting a "time till The Big Rock hits us" countdown.
It's Watchmen all over again.... and while I'm grateful that Obama has bumped the NASA budget.... he's no Ozymandias.
...yeah, it's the buzzword. It's the current growth area.
Let's consider what The Woz did for floppies Back In The Day. While the early floppy drives are to modern drives the way the Wright Brothers plane is comparable to the B2 Stealth Bomber.... the fact is, The Woz turned the industry on its head. While in one light his contributions can be viewed as an incremental improvement, in every other light, HOLY CRAP HE KICKED SO MUCH ASS when it came to primordial microcomputer disk controllers. He proved that the highest-tech, super-chip-count hyper-expensive controllers could be implemented with a handful of chips.
And he could - COULD! - do it again.
I'm totally behind some company - ANY company - throwing money at The Woz, betting on the off chance he gets another flash of insight and pushes storage technology 20 years further ahead in as many minutes.
Was Woz the Right Genius at the Right Time, or is he a straight-up Hacker's Hacker, who just needs the right operational conditions for his genius to manifest?
My problem isn't authoring per se - this machine (quad g5 with a huge amount of ram) does HD editing in FCP tolerably (if I got paid by the job I'd be screaming for new kit, but I get paid by the hour so for the time being it's "good enough"). Where it seriously falls down is with Compressor - getting my videos from FCP into anything else through compressor is intolerably slow.
And while the intel macs may have hit three years ago, my tech budget has been clobbered by video equipment the past few years... my hope is to finally get my hands on an intel powermac with this year's budget.:)
My aforehinted PPC is a 4x2.5ghz G5 with 4.5 gigs of ram and some fairly beefy video. The only problem it has playing 1080p is that my primary monitor is only 1680x1050.
That said, even the crappier intel macs stomp the poop out of my G5 for a lot of things - hell, CS3 runs better on my home machine (intel dual core mini) than it does on my work G5.
Presently, DVD Studio Pro (the "end" component of the Final Cut Studio for many people) will author for DVD and HD-DVD. It will not author for Blu-Ray.
Why this is, is anybody's guess.
Until they pull their heads out of their asses, the ONLY way (that I'm aware of, anyway) to author Blu-Ray video discs on a Mac is to run Adobe Encore on an Intel-based machine. This not only screws over those of us who can't stand Adobe's video software (I've used Encore, and only because I had to - I'll never, ever use Premiere for anything), it bones those of us who are still getting what we can out of our PPC macs.
Apple could fix this by addressing the problem (and any other issues) with a new version of Final Cut Studio.
And until they do that, Adobe's going to be eating into their market share.
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TeX is Obtuse and used by people who need it because other applications don't do what they need (that's how it came to exist in the first place!).
You can't get within spitting distance of academia without acquiring at least a basic understanding of Office.
If the features perform reliably and as advertised, then it's a matter of Academicians extending their Office knowledge. You won't have to learn two apps if you don't want to.
People familiar with TeX will almost certainly keep using it; new users will probably go with Office since they already have it and know it to some extent.
That or Microsoft will make the feature implementation so horrifically obtuse (just like the rest of the application suite!) and Academia will stick with TeX because their old docs work with it (always important) and it's - GASP! - easier to use than whatever Microsoft is trying to jam down their throats.
Bottom line, MS is very, very late to the party on this one... and if it weren't the fact that you can't function in Academia without Office (or semi-regular access to a computer with Office), I doubt anyone would notice. Or care.
Risky? Courts in the EU are a lot saner than their US counterparts. Don't want to get slapped with antitrust fines? Obey the law. Really. It's not hard. Sell a better product at a lower price, for example.
Have you seen American business practices lately? That is risky - especially when the .eu won't be granting you billions in cash when the bottom falls out of your broke-ass business plan.
Agreed.
There are a few applications I prefer either single-cored or with limited memory access. After Effects, for example, is so incredibly poorly behaved on the Mac that I'd rather use version 6 - which can only see around 1.5 gigs of ram - than 7 or higher, which can see much more. In my experience it's made almost no difference on rendering time - where it DOES make a difference is in wether or not I'm actually able to use my machine for anything else while the render is grinding.
Of course, you can tell 7+ how much ram to use (same as photoshop), but in my experience these applications willfully ignore user input and treat the machine they're running on as if it exists for that application and that application only.
I'm all for getting the most out of my hardware - but given the choice between an application being a dick about hogging the box and an earlier version that "knows how to share," I'm going to be running the version that gives me the most responsive machine. If that version is multithreaded, great! If it isn't.... well, more CPU for other apps.
The one chunk of IRIX that IMO might still be relevant - the thing you got without having to install over a gig of GPL software - was XFS, and that has been GPLed.
The only advantage I could see to opening IRIX would be in getting a peek under the hood to figure out how to get the framebuffers on the MIPS kit to work with the various freenix distros that run on MIPS. My extremely brief stint with IRIX was spent getting a variety of GPL software (from SSH to the GIMP to Mozilla, etc) up and running under some variant of 6.5. I found the then-current state of linux to be greatly superior in almost every respect. The only advantage of desktop IRIX was the framebuffer support.
The server end, I can't speak on. There may be some benefit there. Otherwise, your target market is a very small market of hobbyists. :)
It's been a ridiculously long time since I read Frank Herbert's Dune (or any of its sequels), but I remember at least one of the books had a couple of scenes with a "cone of silence" much along these lines.
Anyone inside the field could communicate with each other; anyone outside the field couldn't hear them. For added security, the conversants would face the inner wall (iirc the "cone of silence" was walled on three sides) to prevent lip-reading - something that this approach to the idea doesn't cover.
Of course, there's nothing preventing you from simply holding your hand over your mouth...
The orbital period of these exoplanets make Mercury's 88 day loop seem positively sluggish by comparison. The rest of the planets in our system have much longer orbital periods - Earth's is a bit over four times mercury's - to say nothing of the geologic sloth of the outer planets.
That said, from what I know about gravitational microlensing (very little, admittedly), it makes sense that our existing telescopes are picking up a lot of "high speed" planets, and that it's going to take a long time (both in ramping up the tech and in tasking the scope to just sit there and stare at a star, waiting for something to blip by) for the "earth-sized rock in the habitable zone with an earth-length orbital period!" announcements to start rolling in.
That they're catching them smaller is fantastic. I look forward to the scopes catching 'em slower. :)
As somebody who either has an excruciatingly difficult time reading the damned things, or - more frequently - being completely unable to read them at all, I for one welcome the day when captchas are relegated to the dustbin of history.
Seriously. I'd love to just be able to download porn without having to take a screenshot of the browser and then dick around in photoshop for a few minutes (brightness/contrast, pen tool, etc) in order for megaupload or whatever to let me get at the goodies.
I have a hard enough time with normal-shaped words, dammit. This captcha crap is inhumane, and I can't wait to be rid of it. If smarter bot software is what it takes, then so be it - hell, I'd pay for that kind of software, just so I don't have to deal with the damned inconvenience anymore.
Yeah, I tossed it. :-| I was moving at the time and had piles and piles of crap to get rid of, so everything that wasn't 100% functional got the boot. I did try to repair it, though - unfortunately, the problem seemed to be circuitry-related, not mechanical.
(didn't help that the board was filthy on the inside...)
I had one of those.
It was an EXCELLENT keyboard up until about eight months ago when the space bar stopped working. Hard thing to live without, a space bar.
Since I didn't (and still don't) have the fun money for a new one, I've switched to one of the new thin apple keyboards. They get the job done - they're nowhere near as much fun to use as the Tactile Pro, but they suck less than all of the previous Apple USB keyboards. Which admittedly isn't saying much - all previous Apple boards were some variation of passive aggressive mashed potatoes.... including the one I'm using now (at work), which is occasionally a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
The only thing I didn't like about the Matias was the hair-trigger caps lock key - for a company claiming the best Mac board since the Apple Extended // (which was a FANTASTIC keyboard, the closest thing Apple's ever come to a Model M), you'd think they'd have implemented the AE2's "press it and it stays down" caps lock key.
Dammit, now I'm missing mine. :( Time to start saving up the beer money again...
actually works as expected
I think that's the key point, right there.
No user-visible drivers. No having to update each individual component of the system (sound driver, video driver, wireless driver, bluetooth driver, usb driver, ethernet driver, firewire driver, keyboard layout, mouse driver, etc) by downloading files from a dozen different websites. Boot up and go.
Yeah, that stuff is there, and increasingly less necessary even if you're one of the few who shell out for a Mac Pro for the expandability.... but all of the base hardware works fully and completely right out of the box. Hell, they even include windows drivers.
Just one nit - on the current OS X (10.5), you can't run ten year old browsers.... unless you're running linux or windows in a VM. The Classic MacOS stuff just doesn't run anymore.
MacOS, MacOS X, and the reasonably consumer-friendly linux distros can all give the user a decent internet experience without having to wear ten condoms and a hazmat suit.
Windows, not so much.
When given the choice between "no effort" and "somebody's idea of common sense" to staunch the flow of software-AIDS from spraying out of the pipe, which do you think the majority is going to choose?
I'm not going to run windows just for "the best web browser." They want to resurrect the Mac IE port, I'm all for that - IE 5 for the Mac was the best browser on the platform until Mozilla came along.
It doesn't matter how "good" IE8 is - it's windows only, and Windows + Internet == Screaming Assrape. While I run windows at home and at work for non-Mac apps, I don't connect to the internet with my windows machines. I don't use samba (I use an SCP client which is slower but imo less of an asspain than windows networking), I don't download anything, and I damn sure don't install anything that didn't come from a vendor disk.
End result : exponentially fewer security problems than friends who run XP on their wintendos.
IE8 could give me winning lottery numbers and blow jobs... but I'm not running a web browser on Windows, ever. It's like having sex without a condom at an STD conference.
I'm in Pittsburgh, where this sort of behavior happens on wide open intersections all the time - most notably (for me, anyway) at Forbes and Craig, which is in no way at all a blind intersection.
This is also notably a problem with the bus lane on the birmingham bridge - cars will stop a full length or two over the white line they're supposed to stop at, then honk loudly and scream like ignorant pissants when a bus lurches off of the bridge and "blocks them" as the bus is trying to make its turn.
The issue isn't just "pedestrians are douchebags"* It's that motorists are also douchebags. Douchebags with air conditioning and horns. And while this kind of behavior is irritating for a pedestrian, I CAN just walk around it or hop over the hood. A vehicle trying to turn onto the street you're BLOCKING by having stopped on the crosswalk doesn't have that luxury, and is going to cause more of a traffic mess by trying to get around your inconsiderate ass than I would by double-timing it out of the way of an incoming bus.
Idiot pedestrians are a problem for motorists. Idiot motorists are a problem for pedestrians and other motorists, and such inconsiderate behavior should be penalized.
* as one, I still have no love for the herds that clog Forbes and Bigelow every day, slowing traffic to a crawl. Bad (pedestrian) traffic design, that.
Can we? Can we PLEASE?
I'm a lifelong pedestrian. Running red lights, gunning it on yellow, and the Pittsburgh left don't bother me. What bugs me is the endless supply of $%$#%@! who stop at a red light ON THE CROSSWALK, instead of at the line well behind it. This behavior forces those of us who are on foot to either walk behind the offender, or worse (when the offender realizes their mistake, tries to back up, and the car behind them just Does Not Care), walk out into traffic.
Find a way to ticket THESE idiots for being a public nuisance. You'll make the pedestrians happy and you'll be rolling in dough. :P
I have a Canon Powershot A95. It's getting long in the tooth and is due for replacement whenever I can afford something better*.... over its service life, I've had one GLARING problem with it - with the flash off, under the camera's idea of low-light conditions, I have to take five, ten, two dozen pictures using various auto-mode settings to get something that's even moderately focused. It's fine for broad daylight outdoors, but indoors or starting at dusk outside, it's extremely frustrating to use.
Half that is, admittedly, dumbassery on my part. The other half has hopefully been fixed with newer camera technology.
I'd like to take one picture, in focus, and move on. Failing that, I'd like the response time to be fast enough that I can switch through modes and take pictures of moving objects while they're still in range!
* I can get "better" in almost every respect for much less than I paid for the A95. But if I want the Killer Feature - the flippy LCD screen - then a new camera is going to cost me about the same as the old one ($300+).
... isn't some developer's idea of benchmarks, but estimates based on actual Real World Use.
For example - my laptop* will last a day or two unplugged in sleep mode. There's one metric for you - how long will it last if you stick it in your bag and forget about it?
My laptop will last maybe an hour - if that - running Photoshop. That stresses the disk, the ram, pegs the processor, etc.
It might last through a DVD if I'm not doing anything else. Optical drive is the big drain here - newer machines can handle the rest while barely ticking over.
Slurping a bigass (4+ gig) video file off of a thumb drive through a USB1 port completely drained the battery. That's sustained, heavy use of ports and disk.
Ultimately, I don't care how long the laptop battery lasts with "average use." I care about how well it holds up to the very extremes - extreme neglect (how long can it sleep on a full or moderate charge?), regular-for-me use (fullbore photoshop until the charge meter hits red), and Worst Case Scenario (I'm in the middle of the country trying to get all of my critical files copied onto my ipod or other laptop-powered USB drive).
Apple's battery monitoring software gives a fairly accurate, frequently updated guesstimate of battery time remaining and charge time remaining - and you're only going to get those figures through stressing the machine the way you'll be using it - not through skimming the interwebs for benchmarks that care deeply about ways you'll never use the hardware.
In my opinion, it may be easier to develop better battery monitors than it will be to develop and publish accurate test suites.
* An old 12" Powerbook G4 that's way past its prime. Newer lappies will get longer life for these scenarios but I think they stand as ballpark figures.
NOTHING will kick NASA (and Roscosmos) in the ass like some actual competition.
We beat the Soviets to the moon... now, can we get back there before the Chinese?
... look forward to the day when Space sets the national agenda in the Hearts And Minds, as it did during Kennedy's term in office.
NASA gets 18 billion and change this year.
The DOD got over 400 billion in discretionary spending in 2008.
I called my dad on the anniversary of Apollo 8, We talked about how he'd heard the broadcast in his youth, the state of the space program and the future of manned spaceflight. He's of the opinion that the next boots on the moon will be Chinese. I'd prefer to think otherwise... but he thought Ellen Tigh was a Cylon at her very first appearance... and hey, they need it more than we do.
More money for Space is always a good thing. Look at what NASA has given Americans in terms of national pride and the world in terms of scientific advances.... then look at the price tage of the Joint Strike Fighter and its price/performance ratio compared to current ready-to-fly equipment. Look at the price tag of our post-Clinton "nation building." Tell me the world wouldn't benefit more from NASA being tossed, say... an eighth of the DOD budget.
Hell, for the price of invading Iraq we could be holding national lotteries to see who gets to be on the next colony ship to MARS.
Our only hope as a species is to get off of this rock before we turn it into Venus Junior. The only agencies that can get us there - Roscosmos, NASA - can't even begin to try for lack of adequate funding.
Which, ultimately, stems from lack of adequate political incentive.
In terms of securing a future for the species, every dollar spent on NASA increases our chances more than any 100 million spent on "defense" (from what? Asteroids? Global warming? Some kind of superflu?). Unfortunately, that money isn't going to be spent until every television channel and radio station is broadcasting a "time till The Big Rock hits us" countdown.
It's Watchmen all over again.... and while I'm grateful that Obama has bumped the NASA budget.... he's no Ozymandias.
Hell, try finding a McDonalds IN Harrisburg....
(seriously - I was stuck there for three or four hours on a Sunday during a bus layover.... there. Was. NOTHING.)
...yeah, it's the buzzword. It's the current growth area.
Let's consider what The Woz did for floppies Back In The Day. While the early floppy drives are to modern drives the way the Wright Brothers plane is comparable to the B2 Stealth Bomber.... the fact is, The Woz turned the industry on its head. While in one light his contributions can be viewed as an incremental improvement, in every other light, HOLY CRAP HE KICKED SO MUCH ASS when it came to primordial microcomputer disk controllers. He proved that the highest-tech, super-chip-count hyper-expensive controllers could be implemented with a handful of chips.
And he could - COULD! - do it again.
I'm totally behind some company - ANY company - throwing money at The Woz, betting on the off chance he gets another flash of insight and pushes storage technology 20 years further ahead in as many minutes.
Was Woz the Right Genius at the Right Time, or is he a straight-up Hacker's Hacker, who just needs the right operational conditions for his genius to manifest?
Time will tell.
My problem isn't authoring per se - this machine (quad g5 with a huge amount of ram) does HD editing in FCP tolerably (if I got paid by the job I'd be screaming for new kit, but I get paid by the hour so for the time being it's "good enough"). Where it seriously falls down is with Compressor - getting my videos from FCP into anything else through compressor is intolerably slow.
And while the intel macs may have hit three years ago, my tech budget has been clobbered by video equipment the past few years... my hope is to finally get my hands on an intel powermac with this year's budget. :)
My aforehinted PPC is a 4x2.5ghz G5 with 4.5 gigs of ram and some fairly beefy video. The only problem it has playing 1080p is that my primary monitor is only 1680x1050.
That said, even the crappier intel macs stomp the poop out of my G5 for a lot of things - hell, CS3 runs better on my home machine (intel dual core mini) than it does on my work G5.
Yeah - off the top of my head, out of an entire hemisphere.... Denmark has Greenland and the UK has the Falkland Islands.
I dunno how to file Quebec.
Disc authoring.
Presently, DVD Studio Pro (the "end" component of the Final Cut Studio for many people) will author for DVD and HD-DVD. It will not author for Blu-Ray.
Why this is, is anybody's guess.
Until they pull their heads out of their asses, the ONLY way (that I'm aware of, anyway) to author Blu-Ray video discs on a Mac is to run Adobe Encore on an Intel-based machine. This not only screws over those of us who can't stand Adobe's video software (I've used Encore, and only because I had to - I'll never, ever use Premiere for anything), it bones those of us who are still getting what we can out of our PPC macs.
Apple could fix this by addressing the problem (and any other issues) with a new version of Final Cut Studio.
And until they do that, Adobe's going to be eating into their market share.
A MUD is much more powerful and and much less of a grind fest than any MUD I have ever played.
I think you mean A MUD is much more powerful and and much less of a grind fest than any MMO I have ever played.
That said, it's a heck of a lot easier to implement a rich hyper-flexible, extensible environment in text than it is with graphics. :)