Do the math, considering the normal rate of severe injuries and death for a major city and the number of people who go through there every day, Disneyland and Disney World would rate as some of the safest places on Earth.
Its kind of like the people who get freaked about the risk to our children in schools from school shootings--they are more likely to be killed within a couple of blocks from school than they are on school property.
Doesn't confining a laptop to a classroom defeat the purpose of having a laptop? Besides, letting them take the laptops home allows them to write papers etc while at home.
That said, the iBook is a pretty durable laptop. You can put one through a good deal of abuse and it will still come out okay. So broken is only a nominal issue.
Lost and Stolen are more of a concern, but I don't see that as being a big problem in a small town when the laptops are already being locked down and probably have the serial numbers linked to the students. This isn't exactly NYC we're talking about here--if you leave a backpack on a bus you'll probably get the backpack back with all of its contents intact.
Actually its entirely possible that they come with Deimos Rising and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4--they tend to come already installed on new macs.
I think the concern is that they don't want them running "ye random software that you download from the net" for whatever reason.
Seems kind of odd to lock the systems though, just a recipe for disaster as far as tech support is concerned--you'll need to have one person do all of your troubleshooting for every system, rather than having the students do any of their own or be able to do little things like reinstall the OS.
Speaking of which, I wonder if they are locking firmware?
It isn't a matter of right or wrong, it isn't a matter of being technically accurate, its a matter of not jumping on people for this kind of mistake, because they are going to make it, repeatedly.
You want to sell people on the idea of "Linux on a Desktop?"
Its less of a mouthful than "Linux with GNU tools, a UFS file system, the KDE window manager, and the bash shell running on a Desktop Computer"
Which is technically more accurate and more complete, covers the four principle components of a unix operating system, and is completely unintelligible to my mother.
If you want people to start adopting it, let them think of it as "linux on the desktop." When they say it needs a set of UI guidelines that people follow, just nod and recognize/what they are saying/ (which is dead on accurate in this case) rather than telling them that their terminology is wrong.
>The G5 is a cool processor, but it isn't the reason the VT >cluster is so fast, the Infiniband interconnect is
You are half right and completely wrong.
The Infiniband interconnect is fast, it is cool, and it is a big part of the reason that they got so much out of the G5s, however, the G5s had to have something there to give. Rpeak is the telling statistic on this point--that is purely based on the processors.
The "Big Mac" has the third highest Rpeak as well as the third highest Rmax. This says that yes, the G5/is/ responsible for the speed of the cluster. Infiniband may be responsible for its efficiency, but it is not the only determining factor in this any more than the processor is.
You have to admit it is at least better than Cliff's "some random mac user somewhere had this problem, didn't bother to check support.apple.com and now hates all things apple."
>After thinking about it however, I realized that these >complaints were mis-directed. Clipboard data is not an >application-specific function. Therefore, the problem is >not something specific to The Gimp, but rather to X11.
That it isn't GIMP's problem doesn't keep it from being, well, a problem with GIMP.
Yep, because Premier 6, a discontinued and unoptimized software product, and Microsoft Word benchmarks between systems (some of which have RAID arrays or 256 MB graphics cards) is/completely/ valid...
> Thus, I think Apple is misleading the consumer, since >their advertising seems to lead the consumer thinking it's >the fastest in general, which it clearly is not.
I can throw a test at the Earth Simulator (fastest computer in the world, top of the supercomputer chart) which would make an old G3 look fast in comparison.
Just make sure that it is single threaded and can't be "vectorized" for any reasonable speed increase. The individual processors that make it up are very good at vector processing, but are crippled otherwise.
Therefore, based on this standard, we cannot even claim that it is the top supercomputer in the world, despite that it is the first computer on the Top500 list (uh oh, that name is even misleading advertising)./All/ systems comparisons are hinge around what we are benchmarking on. If I pull out HMMer or BLAST benchmarks (which are real world, even though you don't use them) it will make the P4 look like a toy in comparison. On the other hand, there are things that the G5 does not do nearly as well in (though sometimes, like with Cinebench, this is more of software problem than one that has anything to do with hardware).
"You cannot air commercial claiming something that might be false."
"Hi, were sorry, but you can't state anything factual any of your commercials without including cited studies that have no contradiction, error bars on your statistics, and be sure to use guarded language before everything."
Since, after all, anything that has a type-1 error (everything that involves statistics)/might/ be false.
Apple's strategy is simple, but counterintuitive if you are used to thinking of things separately.
Apple has had a dramatic increase in the number of sales of the iPod and have established market dominance with the iTMS. It/might/ not be sustainable, but over the long run will break even as their costs go down. Where they make money on this deal is in the sale of the iPods, which cuts the sting of loss by a good bit. Their hardware is cheap (they get XServe RAIDs at cost) and long term expenses seem to be (relatively) low.
In short, they are taking a business risk. its a business risk, but the potential for gain is good (by being first to market, having the best mindshare, and having a secondary product which will make money), and I am positive that I would call it "potentially fatal" or reckless, which is what the Register seems to imply.
>Your analogy is stupid. People share (legally) Word files a >lot more often than they legally share music files. Unless >you are somehow actively advocating the illegal sharing of >music files, I don't see why popularity base has anything >to do with your choice of music format.
The analogy is good, your understanding is flawed. People don't share music legally very often, but that's not particularly relevant.
Popularity has everything to do with why Apple would select mp3 over Ogg and AAC over Ogg (they are making it popular). It also has everything to do with why they should take WMA over Ogg, should they be forced to make that decision.
Without Ogg support in the iPod, I have no reason (whatsoever) to rip my files in Ogg format. I can rip them in 192 kbps AAC and get excellent quality and it will play on my iPod with no difficult and even work with the visualizer (which I never use, but hey, its there) in iTunes.
[quote] Moore's law has just about caught up to portable players to the point where they can reasonably be expected to support additional file formats for almost no marginal cost. Any modern player should support all of the formats. [/quote]
The problem isn't computation (which is what Moore's Law deals with--transistor counts) but with memory and hardware encodings. Upping the speed of the processor only helps so much with this kind of thing.
I do not consider lacking ogg to be a deficit--at all. Virtually my entire library is 192 kbps AAC (what I rip myself), 128 kbps AAC (what I buy from iTMS), or 256 kbps MP3 (VBR) (older rips I haven't gotten around to reripping yet). Therefore, when I look at portable players, I rank lacking ogg with lacking MPC, Blade, or WMA.
I think most consumers are in the exact same boat.
The reason why WMA would be more useful is because more people use WMA.
It doesn't matter if, on some ideological (or even technical) level Ogg is "better" (why do I get the image of that guy from SG1? Kom-chy-a!) most people do not use it. Full stop, end of story.
If I produce a word processor and I had a limited number of file formats I could support it would behoove me to select Word over OpenOffice. Why? Because more people use Word than OpenOffice and if I want to appeal to more people that is the way to go.
There is also the point that no one is selling DRM-wrapped Ogg files (not that this is not possible). They/are/, however, selling DRM-wrapped WMA files. Appealing to more customers again.
>Because ogg is patent and royalty free, there's no reason >for it not to be adopted by everyone and be everywhere.
There/is/ a reason not to support it on an iPod: they already are paying for support of AAC and MP3s and can only fit a limited number of formats in its memory.
AAC is a given, the Apple Music Store distributes in it and its what's used in mpeg4 files.
MP3 is a given.
AIFF/WAV are givens.
I want to see support for (smaller) lossless formats before I see Ogg support.
For me as an end user, I never (directly) see the license fees paid by Apple for mp3 or AAC support (if they even have to pay the latter). iTunes is distributed to me for free and it does not support ripping to ogg and my iPod won't play ogg, why should I bother with it?
>iTunes does exactly what Palladium is designed to do: it >controls the content that users download by encrypting it >and keeping the decryption key from the user. When it >runs, it takes control of the computer to make sure that >the data is used only in authorized ways.
Where the heck do you get your information?
Any music that you download outside of iTMS iTunes will play without blinking and won't modify (albeit it lacks Ogg support, but you can even add that). It will rip to (unrestricted) AAC, MP3, AIFF, or WAV files without any difficulty.
The only files that are "restricted" in any way are the ones you purchase from the iTMS. Even with those it doesn't "make sure the data is only being used in authorized ways"--you can burn and rerip it and there won't be a single control in place. Nor does it "take control of the computer" to make sure of anything--QuickTime just happens to be the only mechanism (currently, no word on if they are licensing it) that can play m4p files.
It's no more "taking control of your computer" than GPG does when you receive an encrypted document.
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Do the math, considering the normal rate of severe injuries and death for a major city and the number of people who go through there every day, Disneyland and Disney World would rate as some of the safest places on Earth.
Its kind of like the people who get freaked about the risk to our children in schools from school shootings--they are more likely to be killed within a couple of blocks from school than they are on school property.
Bah, I think the ability to cook your breakfast while you update your morning reports has its advantages.
Yep, using the same definition of innovation as Microsoft, you're right.
Copy your ideas from Apple, give it a slightly different finish and not do it as well, and then have it named "innovative."
Bloody brilliant.
Doesn't confining a laptop to a classroom defeat the purpose of having a laptop? Besides, letting them take the laptops home allows them to write papers etc while at home.
That said, the iBook is a pretty durable laptop. You can put one through a good deal of abuse and it will still come out okay. So broken is only a nominal issue.
Lost and Stolen are more of a concern, but I don't see that as being a big problem in a small town when the laptops are already being locked down and probably have the serial numbers linked to the students. This isn't exactly NYC we're talking about here--if you leave a backpack on a bus you'll probably get the backpack back with all of its contents intact.
Actually its entirely possible that they come with Deimos Rising and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4--they tend to come already installed on new macs.
I think the concern is that they don't want them running "ye random software that you download from the net" for whatever reason.
Seems kind of odd to lock the systems though, just a recipe for disaster as far as tech support is concerned--you'll need to have one person do all of your troubleshooting for every system, rather than having the students do any of their own or be able to do little things like reinstall the OS.
Speaking of which, I wonder if they are locking firmware?
But do they walk around in jackets with MAFIA written on their back in neon-green electropigment?
"Mafia, you've got a friend in the family."
It isn't a matter of right or wrong, it isn't a matter of being technically accurate, its a matter of not jumping on people for this kind of mistake, because they are going to make it, repeatedly.
/what they are saying/ (which is dead on accurate in this case) rather than telling them that their terminology is wrong.
You want to sell people on the idea of "Linux on a Desktop?"
Its less of a mouthful than "Linux with GNU tools, a UFS file system, the KDE window manager, and the bash shell running on a Desktop Computer"
Which is technically more accurate and more complete, covers the four principle components of a unix operating system, and is completely unintelligible to my mother.
If you want people to start adopting it, let them think of it as "linux on the desktop." When they say it needs a set of UI guidelines that people follow, just nod and recognize
You do realize you just make linux that much less appealing to end users on desktop systems every time you and your kin start with this bullshit?
Nope, its "strange women" you're thinking of another line:
"You can't expect to weild supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!"
>The G5 is a cool processor, but it isn't the reason the VT
/is/ responsible for the speed of the cluster. Infiniband may be responsible for its efficiency, but it is not the only determining factor in this any more than the processor is.
>cluster is so fast, the Infiniband interconnect is
You are half right and completely wrong.
The Infiniband interconnect is fast, it is cool, and it is a big part of the reason that they got so much out of the G5s, however, the G5s had to have something there to give. Rpeak is the telling statistic on this point--that is purely based on the processors.
The "Big Mac" has the third highest Rpeak as well as the third highest Rmax. This says that yes, the G5
You have to admit it is at least better than Cliff's "some random mac user somewhere had this problem, didn't bother to check support.apple.com and now hates all things apple."
From the article:
>After thinking about it however, I realized that these
>complaints were mis-directed. Clipboard data is not an
>application-specific function. Therefore, the problem is
>not something specific to The Gimp, but rather to X11.
That it isn't GIMP's problem doesn't keep it from being, well, a problem with GIMP.
<a href="http://www.ambrosiasw.com/news/upcoming/ima<nobr>g<wbr></wbr></nobr> es/spx2_panther_expose.mov">Ambrosia's Posted Demo</a>.
Check the most recent Newsweek, it isn't online that I've seen. Page... 29 or 39?
Yep, because Premier 6, a discontinued and unoptimized software product, and Microsoft Word benchmarks between systems (some of which have RAID arrays or 256 MB graphics cards) is /completely/ valid...
> Thus, I think Apple is misleading the consumer, since
/All/ systems comparisons are hinge around what we are benchmarking on. If I pull out HMMer or BLAST benchmarks (which are real world, even though you don't use them) it will make the P4 look like a toy in comparison. On the other hand, there are things that the G5 does not do nearly as well in (though sometimes, like with Cinebench, this is more of software problem than one that has anything to do with hardware).
>their advertising seems to lead the consumer thinking it's
>the fastest in general, which it clearly is not.
I can throw a test at the Earth Simulator (fastest computer in the world, top of the supercomputer chart) which would make an old G3 look fast in comparison.
Just make sure that it is single threaded and can't be "vectorized" for any reasonable speed increase. The individual processors that make it up are very good at vector processing, but are crippled otherwise.
Therefore, based on this standard, we cannot even claim that it is the top supercomputer in the world, despite that it is the first computer on the Top500 list (uh oh, that name is even misleading advertising).
So are the Intel adds which imply Hyper Threading will make your computer more secure banned?
"You cannot air commercial claiming something that might be false."
/might/ be false.
"Hi, were sorry, but you can't state anything factual any of your commercials without including cited studies that have no contradiction, error bars on your statistics, and be sure to use guarded language before everything."
Since, after all, anything that has a type-1 error (everything that involves statistics)
Apple's strategy is simple, but counterintuitive if you are used to thinking of things separately.
/might/ not be sustainable, but over the long run will break even as their costs go down. Where they make money on this deal is in the sale of the iPods, which cuts the sting of loss by a good bit. Their hardware is cheap (they get XServe RAIDs at cost) and long term expenses seem to be (relatively) low.
Apple has had a dramatic increase in the number of sales of the iPod and have established market dominance with the iTMS. It
In short, they are taking a business risk. its a business risk, but the potential for gain is good (by being first to market, having the best mindshare, and having a secondary product which will make money), and I am positive that I would call it "potentially fatal" or reckless, which is what the Register seems to imply.
>Your analogy is stupid. People share (legally) Word files a
>lot more often than they legally share music files. Unless
>you are somehow actively advocating the illegal sharing of
>music files, I don't see why popularity base has anything
>to do with your choice of music format.
The analogy is good, your understanding is flawed. People don't share music legally very often, but that's not particularly relevant.
Popularity has everything to do with why Apple would select mp3 over Ogg and AAC over Ogg (they are making it popular). It also has everything to do with why they should take WMA over Ogg, should they be forced to make that decision.
Without Ogg support in the iPod, I have no reason (whatsoever) to rip my files in Ogg format. I can rip them in 192 kbps AAC and get excellent quality and it will play on my iPod with no difficult and even work with the visualizer (which I never use, but hey, its there) in iTunes.
[quote]
Moore's law has just about caught up to portable players to the point where they can reasonably be expected to support additional file formats for almost no marginal cost. Any modern player should support all of the formats.
[/quote]
The problem isn't computation (which is what Moore's Law deals with--transistor counts) but with memory and hardware encodings. Upping the speed of the processor only helps so much with this kind of thing.
I do not consider lacking ogg to be a deficit--at all. Virtually my entire library is 192 kbps AAC (what I rip myself), 128 kbps AAC (what I buy from iTMS), or 256 kbps MP3 (VBR) (older rips I haven't gotten around to reripping yet). Therefore, when I look at portable players, I rank lacking ogg with lacking MPC, Blade, or WMA.
I think most consumers are in the exact same boat.
...and I can create Ogg files which are DRMed using the same methodology used by Apple for the m4p files. Your point?
The reason why WMA would be more useful is because more people use WMA.
/are/, however, selling DRM-wrapped WMA files. Appealing to more customers again.
/is/ a reason not to support it on an iPod: they already are paying for support of AAC and MP3s and can only fit a limited number of formats in its memory.
It doesn't matter if, on some ideological (or even technical) level Ogg is "better" (why do I get the image of that guy from SG1? Kom-chy-a!) most people do not use it. Full stop, end of story.
If I produce a word processor and I had a limited number of file formats I could support it would behoove me to select Word over OpenOffice. Why? Because more people use Word than OpenOffice and if I want to appeal to more people that is the way to go.
There is also the point that no one is selling DRM-wrapped Ogg files (not that this is not possible). They
>Because ogg is patent and royalty free, there's no reason
>for it not to be adopted by everyone and be everywhere.
There
AAC is a given, the Apple Music Store distributes in it and its what's used in mpeg4 files.
MP3 is a given.
AIFF/WAV are givens.
I want to see support for (smaller) lossless formats before I see Ogg support.
For me as an end user, I never (directly) see the license fees paid by Apple for mp3 or AAC support (if they even have to pay the latter). iTunes is distributed to me for free and it does not support ripping to ogg and my iPod won't play ogg, why should I bother with it?
The previews are downsampled tremendously.
>iTunes does exactly what Palladium is designed to do: it
>controls the content that users download by encrypting it
>and keeping the decryption key from the user. When it
>runs, it takes control of the computer to make sure that
>the data is used only in authorized ways.
Where the heck do you get your information?
Any music that you download outside of iTMS iTunes will play without blinking and won't modify (albeit it lacks Ogg support, but you can even add that). It will rip to (unrestricted) AAC, MP3, AIFF, or WAV files without any difficulty.
The only files that are "restricted" in any way are the ones you purchase from the iTMS. Even with those it doesn't "make sure the data is only being used in authorized ways"--you can burn and rerip it and there won't be a single control in place. Nor does it "take control of the computer" to make sure of anything--QuickTime just happens to be the only mechanism (currently, no word on if they are licensing it) that can play m4p files.
It's no more "taking control of your computer" than GPG does when you receive an encrypted document.
>Number of Apple computers shipped without Mac OS X: 0
Untrue:
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/