It's only those that don't refuse to comprimise or see the other point of view that kick and scream until they get weird comprimises that don't really work at all...those types of people, althought being roughly 5% of the population
Heh, you are a much kinder person than I am. I put the amount of those types at more like 50% of the population!
If the receiver is passive, it doesn't know how far away the reader is. Extra power to the reader and presto!
It's not as easy as you think. First of all radiative power falls off as the inverse square of distance. This means that if a normal reader reads a tag at 20 inches then to read a tag at 40 inches (twice the distance) you will need 4 times the power, or 4 times the sensitivity, or some combination thereof.
Now 40 inches is still way too short to be useful at tracking someone. Let's choose a more reasonable value at 20 feet - still an extremely short distance for a tracker to work. At 20 feet you would need the reader to be 12^2, or 144, times better.
This doesn't even include the fact that at those distances you are going to have to start worrying about multipath interference, attenuation of the signal due to trees, buildings and terrain, and signal degradation due to the scaling up of the power levels. You will also start to have interference effects with other transmitting devices. Then you need to come up with some sort of triangulation system...
In short, it is highly unlikely that a system designed for use at 20 inches is going to be able to be used for reliable tracking at any sort of distance. And if you can get within a few feet of the person, what is the point of trying to use a device to track them?
I just wish more people could be like you, looking at both sides, seeing their valid arguments, and arriving at a solutiong that balances both sides out.
Yeah, unfortunately it's a lot easier said than done. My personal balanced solution might be considered to be foolish by someone else. Get a few people together to decide on an average balanced solution? Well, if you get a committee of people together to do that you will probably end up with a weird set of compromise rules and conditions that don't work at all
Heh, this is why I love the life of an pure research scientist. You can forget completely about the real world and come up with a perfectly theoretical structure that fits together precisely! No worrying about how the damn thing applies to the real world, leave that up to the engineers and managers.
Kinda takes the steam out of the story. Since whoever wrote this story left out or hid gigantic facts, I'm going to continue to call many privacy activists paranoid.
I do believe there is a big difference between a healthy amount of paranoia and a pathological amount of paranoia.
It is healthy to want a certain amount of anonymity for your purchases, personal thoughts, and activities. It becomes unhealthy when you start believing that every kind of information gathering effort is targeted at interfering with your well-being.
Right now most of the information gathered about students in school is the same as would be with the proposed RFID devices. Arrival times at school, making sure they are in class, checking on if they made it to the nurse - these are all things that can be done without RFID but RFID makes them easier for a school administrator to do. Anything that makes it easier for a school administrator to run a school is a GOOD thing.
We should always look out for possible abuses, such as being able to use such tags over long distances to track someone, the security of the school records, etc. This system seems to have taken at least some of those concerns into account with making the tags only work in close proximity and having each type of record require a different password. So long as we balance our technology with a healthy dose of paranoia we should be in the best position.
There needs to be some sort of payoff for playing a monster. Perhaps you get something of value each time you do it, e.g. (play) money you can give to a character of your choosing.
Make it so that you not only get a semi-random monster (you can choose its general level, but you get +- some amount). Not only that but you appear in a random area (one that the monster would usually be in) and have to stay in that area. Maybe give the monster an item that stays in one place to guard or some sort of quest.
Now you pay a chunk of experience to do this, related to the level of monster you chose. You gain experience for every player that you defeat by either tricking, trapping, killing, etc. However if you are defeated you lose the experience you payed in when you got the monster. If you give up being a monster because no one takes your quest maybe you get a little experience for being a monster, but only a little and only like once per day.
Most importantly, you can't become a monster unless you have the free experience. That way a person can't create a character, become a big monster, allow himself to be defeated by a friend player, and then repeat with a new character. The best you could do is to transfer some of your experience to another person. In fact, make it a loss overall by making the maximum experience output be less than the monster player put in.
The 'limit' is only there so you cant script automated mass-burns
You can't? It's not automatic but it's not hard to script. Here's a AppleScript script that I whipped up that could burn as many CDs as you want from a playlist, it just rotates the songs around. I haven't tested it or debugged it but it should be close.
set continueBurn to true repeat while continueBurn is true
display dialog "The playlist \"Burnlist\" will be burned." & ¬
return & ¬
"Put a blank CD in the drive." ¬
buttons {"Cancel Burn", "Burn CD"} ¬
default button "Burn CD"
if dialog reply is "Burn CD" then
tell application "iTunes"
activate
set selection to playlist "Burnlist"
end tell
tell application "System Events"
tell process "iTunes"
«event prcsclic» «class menI» ¬
"Burn Playlist to Disk" of ¬
«class menE» "File" of «class mbar» 1
end tell
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
duplicate the first track in playlist "Burnlist" to ¬
the end of the playlist "Burnlist"
delete the first track in the playlist "Burnlist"
end tell
else
set continueBurn to false
end if end repeat
Well I have no clue on how to get HTML entities to appear properly here so just replace "& # 172;" with option-return when you are typing this into the Script Editor. Replace "& # 171;" with option-\ and "& # 187;" with shift-option-\
The point I'm making here is that this sort of copy protection on Apple's part is really just a speed bump designed to make the record labels comfortable with selling songs electronically. It's really not much of a barrier to doing what you want with the music.
A calorie is the amount of heat required to raise 1 gram of pure water at +4C to +5C under 1 atm pressure.
Not exactly true. The measurement of calorie has had many methods to determine the value. It is sometimes measured as 1/100 of the amount of heat needed to raise 1 g of water from 0 degrees celsius to 100 degrees celcius. Other people have used the definition of the amount of heat needed to raise 1 g of water from 4 degrees celsius to 5 degrees celsius. The problem is that all of the different definitions give you slightly different sized calories. It is for this reason that in 1950 the calorie was fixed at equaling 4.184 joules. The definition of a joule is a very precise definition and by extension the calorie becomes more precisely defined.
You definiton of calorie makes a calorie equal to 4.2055 joules. This is off from the currently defined value of one calorie equalling 4.184 joules. To see a good discussion of this topic, visit this web site.
I think contact with the surrounding air (and external condensation effects) will affect the can's warming in addition to your own effects.
True the soda could warm before you drink it but for this exercise it is safe to assume that it enters your body at 4 degrees celsius. We also assume that you chug it so that the amount left in the can between sips doesn't have time to warm it. Once it is inside your body the heat transfer is pretty close to 100%. It's not that special of a situation.
1 Cal (uppercase C) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1g of water 1 degree celsius
A Calorie (the one used on food labels) is actually a kilocalorie. A Calorie is therefore 1000 calories. 1 calorie is basically the amount of heat needed to raise 1g of water 1 degree celsius. (A calorie is actually 1/100 of amount of heat needed to get 1 gram of water from 0 degrees C to 100 degrees C, but that works out almost the same.)
So warming a 4 degrees C, 350mL Coke to 37 degrees C would take (37 - 4) * 350 = 11550 calories. This is 11.55 kilocalories or 11.55 Calories. The Coke has around 300 Calories in nutritive value therefore you would gain 300 - 11.55 = 288.45 Calories of energy from a 4 degrees C, 350mL can of Coke.
Almost definitely better? So which is it, almost or definitely?... Online distribution is nice, but it's more important to also have your CDs available in stores across the country.
Yeah yeah, sue me for not being completely coherent!:-)
I believe that I was basically trying to get across what you have said. The service provided by CD Baby is a great deal, but possibly just short of being better than a deal through a large mainstream music label. Look at it this way, with CD Baby you will almost certainly do decently but it's too small a label to really help you become a mega-star. On the other hand a major label can make you a mega-star, but it's very unlikely that you will make it huge.
It's a risk verses reward thing. CD Baby - low risk, low possibility of a huge reward. Major label - huge risk, higher possibility of a huge reward. The way things are going in the music industry I'd prefer the lower but probably more steady rewards of CD Baby rather than the higher but very uncertain rewards of a major label.
I don't see how they could steal users away from Apple's service without actually making their service better than Apple's - which would actually be a great thing. Two huge corporations battling to make music services better and cheaper - nice.
Yep competition is a good thing. The problem is that when you have a company that is a monopoly in a market and it uses that monopoly position to create a barrier to entry into that market then any other company will find it too difficult to enter into competition.
Take cars for example. Suppose Ford has a super engine that runs only on fuel made by Ford. Now Fords sell like crazy and take over the market. Years down the road the gas stations only sell Ford fuel because there are so many Ford cars. What are the chances of a new car being made that runs on Ford fuel? None, because Ford engines are the only ones that can. What are the chances that new cars come out that don't run on Ford fuel? None, because there are hardly any service stations that sell non-Ford fuel. The net result? Only Ford cars and Ford fuel are produced.
Yes, this is a simplistic example and might not be 100% real-world but it does highlight the basics behind monopolies. Right now Microsoft has a monopoly because it is the predominant operating system. If it uses that monopoly to drive out competitors in related markets, say web browsers, then it is abusing its monopolistic position.
The same thing goes if Microsoft decided to release a security update that breaks Apple's iTunes without telling anyone. Boom, iTunes starts working crappy and people blame Apple when the fault is all Microsoft. Don't think this can't happen, it has happened before with Quicktime. It was shown in internal memos that Quicktime was broken on Windows for a while because Microsoft deliberately changed a few libraries without warning.
As long as there is fair and open competition the consumer, and the companies, will benefit. If any company is allowed to squash its competition entirely then the consumer will suffer.
I suspect that Pepsi promotion is going to help pad Apple's numbers if it looks like they're going to be a little short.
Heh, actually Steve Jobs already mentioned that in his presentation on Windows iTunes and iTunes Music Store 2. He basically said that they hope to sell 100 million in a year since iTunes launched and in fact they already have because of the Pepsi deal.
Gotta love how he pre-spins the story to take the wind out of the sails of the eventual detractors.
The philosophy of Mac OS X (and quite a few other operating systems, especially Unix-like ones) is that you should use as much RAM as you can.
This is a great philosophy until, of course, you've used as much RAM as you can and then you decide you want to load something new.
Not exactly true. It's actually not that slow to page out to the backing store. The backing store is usually a contiguous space on the hard drive and so a page out is pretty quick, hardly any seeking is needed. Not only that but there are probably a ton of pages that are not "dirty" (have changes and need to be written to the backing store before being paged out) and can be just dumped without writing them to the backing store. Most times a page out is pretty quick and painless.
A much more realistic case is that I'm using my memory loading web pages in Safari, I've got email going, itunes has been loading and playing mp3s for the past few weeks, etc., and then I decide I want to play a game. None of the game's data is cached, because it hasn't run recently. So the VM now has to scramble to find 200 MB of pages.
Again, most of those pages probably don't need to be written to the backing store and so they will just be dumped from memory without writing to the hard drive.
Another complication of this is that it's pretty easy to fill up your root partition with swapfiles. Incidentally, this is terrible for disk performance.
Swapfiles are 80 meg files. I've rarely seen more than 1 of them on my system at a time, although I've heard of some people having 2 or 3 after running a ton of memory-intensive applications. As long as you have around 380 megs of RAM or more you probably won't see too many of these. I'd recommend 512 megs of RAM as a good solid baseline for Mac OS X, it only costs about $90 for top-quality RAM.
One probably-related issue that comes to mind is that freeing memory seems to really take a long ass time even if you don't need it. The most glaring example of this is quitting Safari. Safari tends to "leak" memory (I don't know that it really does or if it actually has a legitimate use for tons of memory) over time/page loads, and occasionally I decide to quit it. Quitting Safari tends to stall my entire system for 10-30 seconds.
Freeing memory really should not take that long. That sounds like some sort of bug in Safari, probably a problem with the program shutting down gracefully. It may be creating a ton of class objects (thus the memory leak) and is failing to close those objects properly. When the program closes it then tries to close out those objects creating a logjam of sorts. This probably doesn't have much to do with the memory model of the operating system, it is most likely application-related. I would report your problems to the Safari programming team, I'm sure they would love to fix problems like this.
I think Microsoft got it right on this one. Most of your file cache is marked as both free memory and cache. Should an application request a lot of memory, the system can instantly select any part of the read-only cache and overwrite those pages as used memory now. It also marks pages available to be freed, but doesn't actually clear or free them so if it turns out that the cache manager mispredicted and that stuff really was needed, as long as the pages weren't touched by any other program the OS can just move them back into the cache pool.
In Mac OS X pretty much all of memory (everything except memory that is "wired") can be paged put or re-written as needed. You can read about the Mac OS X memory management scheme here. This is also true of many Unix-like systems and other "modern" operating systems.
the Apple retail stores just recorded their first profitable quarter of business.
Right, that's why I said they were barely breaking even. They have been losing a little money previously but now they have managed to make a small profit in the last quarter. I'm sure they will do better in the future but it really doesn't matter. As long as they aren't losing boatloads of cash they are well worth it for the advertising value.
El Camino Real is "The King's Road". There are actually two El Camino Real's - one in California and one in Texas. They are esentially the first interstate roadways in the New World. In both cases, they were built to link a series Spannish missions.
Well, depending on your definition of "first interstate highway" you would have to give that title to either the Boston Post Road or one of three roads built in the 1950's. The problem is that interstate roads didn't truly exist in a legal sense until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.
However, the Boston Post Road is widely recognized as the first major road in the United States, it has existed in one form or another since at least 1673. The El Camino Real, in comparison, has been around since about 1769.
I can't find the script "Trash songs in the genre Country" anywhere...
Here's the script to do that: (AppleScript)
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with theTrack in every track of the library playlist
if the genre of theTrack is "Country" then
delete theTrack
end if
end repeat end tell
The iTMS is a loss leader for the sale of iPods to both Mac and Windows users.
Yup and it's practically free advertising for Apple. Look at all the press they are getting. Talk about an increase in mindshare, it seems like everyone is talking about Apple and their products these days. Apple is already one of the most recognized brands out there, this will just add more fuel to the fire.
It's like the Apple Stores. The stores are barely breaking even so it would seem like they are not worth the effort but they are huge billboards for Apple and they MAKE money, not lose it. Any company would kill for an advertising campaign that actually paid for itself even before you counted in the increased sales.
Apple is very crafty and the iTunes Music Store is going to pan out big time for them.
I took one look at iTunes and was like "YES!". It's OK and the price is fine. Sadly I live in the UK so am not getting it yet.
Bug the damn music labels to get off their asses and cut deals with Apple to sell songs outside the United States. One thing for sure is that Apple would love to be able to sell to the entire world. They have all the infrastructure in place, all that needs to be done is to start the sales.
You can bet that the minute Apple gets the labels to agree to sales in other regions besides the US then Apple will start selling ASAP to those regions.
Or maybe you've been living a lie, and your god really is evil, and Satan is only trying to liberate you from your chains of ignorance.
Or maybe God is just dog spelled backwards and is really the anti-dog. This could be why dogs fear thunder, it is actually the backwards sound of God saying "Bad dog! Bad dog!"
Just imagine a major artist's contract with a label ends, and they sign up with CDBaby and keep 91% of sales.
Not to rain on the parade here, because the CD Baby deal is still awesome. Here's how it works. Artists are getting 91% of what CD Baby gets from the iTunes Music Store(iTMS). In general, Apple gets 34 cents from each 99 cent track, leaving CD Baby with 65 cents.
65 cents * 91% = 59 cents to the artist.
Now the artist has to pay CD Baby $40 up front to process a CD. So the artist starts out $40 in the hole. After selling 68 songs on iTMS the artist has made back the $40 and goes into the black. Since a CD probably has around 11 tracks on it, that is 6 CDs worth of songs. Not bad at all.
So iTMS and CD Baby absolutely rocks for an independent artist. It's almost definitely better than going the conventional route of getting a major label to press CDs and promote you.
I don't own a Mac, because when ever I go to talk to someone about any advantages the Mac might have, they just talk about how windows sucks.
Fair enough. I totally agree with you, it is much better to talk about the positive of the new system rather then the negative of what you are currently using.
So what does a Mac give you?
- Consistency in design. The vast majority, if not all, of Mac programs use a virtually identical user interface. This means that key command shortcuts, menu placement, preference panels, button layout, etc. are almost always the same between applications. Pretty much once you use one or two programs on the Mac you learn the basics of using any program. It is very cool to sit down at a very complicated program and already know where to find stuff. None of this "Now where did they hide the damn preferences." or "How the hell do I get help on how to use this program."
- Easy device setup. Devices are almost instantly available when they are plugged in. You only rarely need to load a driver, most devices just work without any software or rebooting.
- Easy installation. For most programs you just pop in the disk and drag the program to your Applications folder. If you want to move a program you just move it, pretty much every application on the Macintosh won't break if it is in a non-standard location.
- Compatibility. Samba, NFS, Rendezvous, Fat32, HFS+, SSH, and a billion other acronyms and protocols are supported on the Mac. If it is an open standard chances are that you can connect to it using a Mac. Not only that but every revision of Mac OS X just gets more complete in its compatability.
- Posix compliance, standard Unix-type shell environments. Bash, csh, tcsh, and several other shells work just fine on Mac OS X. Most programs written for Linux, the various BSDs and other Unix-like environments will work with just a quick re-compile. There are a couple of major package management programs out there that have already put everything together for Mac OS X and have terminal and GUI programs to easily install programs.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I feel that Mac OS X is a great melding of traditional terminal-based Unix and a smart and easy GUI. I feel that I get more work done more easily on Mac OS X, where the operating system gets out of my way and lets me do my work as easily as possible. I spend pretty much no time fighting my system and instead I get to focus on the task at hand. I am able to do this without sacrificing power and flexibility. If I need to run the terminal in order to easily grep through a document I can do so in a second. If I need to ssh into my server at work it takes me no time at all. The list goes on.
So continue to use Windows or try Mac OS X, it's up to you. I have made my choice and that choice is Macintosh.
Heh, I've heard people say that the Visualizer is perfect for watching when you get stoned. I wouldn't know because I've never gotten stoned, but I would assume that it is true. The closest I've gotten to a similar state was looking at the Visualizer after a few days without sleep. It was very mesmerizing, it almost puts you into a trance. A very cool effect for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, you are a much kinder person than I am. I put the amount of those types at more like 50% of the population!
It's not as easy as you think. First of all radiative power falls off as the inverse square of distance. This means that if a normal reader reads a tag at 20 inches then to read a tag at 40 inches (twice the distance) you will need 4 times the power, or 4 times the sensitivity, or some combination thereof.
Now 40 inches is still way too short to be useful at tracking someone. Let's choose a more reasonable value at 20 feet - still an extremely short distance for a tracker to work. At 20 feet you would need the reader to be 12^2, or 144, times better.
This doesn't even include the fact that at those distances you are going to have to start worrying about multipath interference, attenuation of the signal due to trees, buildings and terrain, and signal degradation due to the scaling up of the power levels. You will also start to have interference effects with other transmitting devices. Then you need to come up with some sort of triangulation system...
In short, it is highly unlikely that a system designed for use at 20 inches is going to be able to be used for reliable tracking at any sort of distance. And if you can get within a few feet of the person, what is the point of trying to use a device to track them?
Yeah, unfortunately it's a lot easier said than done. My personal balanced solution might be considered to be foolish by someone else. Get a few people together to decide on an average balanced solution? Well, if you get a committee of people together to do that you will probably end up with a weird set of compromise rules and conditions that don't work at all
Heh, this is why I love the life of an pure research scientist. You can forget completely about the real world and come up with a perfectly theoretical structure that fits together precisely! No worrying about how the damn thing applies to the real world, leave that up to the engineers and managers.
I do believe there is a big difference between a healthy amount of paranoia and a pathological amount of paranoia.
It is healthy to want a certain amount of anonymity for your purchases, personal thoughts, and activities. It becomes unhealthy when you start believing that every kind of information gathering effort is targeted at interfering with your well-being.
Right now most of the information gathered about students in school is the same as would be with the proposed RFID devices. Arrival times at school, making sure they are in class, checking on if they made it to the nurse - these are all things that can be done without RFID but RFID makes them easier for a school administrator to do. Anything that makes it easier for a school administrator to run a school is a GOOD thing.
We should always look out for possible abuses, such as being able to use such tags over long distances to track someone, the security of the school records, etc. This system seems to have taken at least some of those concerns into account with making the tags only work in close proximity and having each type of record require a different password. So long as we balance our technology with a healthy dose of paranoia we should be in the best position.
Make it so that you not only get a semi-random monster (you can choose its general level, but you get +- some amount). Not only that but you appear in a random area (one that the monster would usually be in) and have to stay in that area. Maybe give the monster an item that stays in one place to guard or some sort of quest.
Now you pay a chunk of experience to do this, related to the level of monster you chose. You gain experience for every player that you defeat by either tricking, trapping, killing, etc. However if you are defeated you lose the experience you payed in when you got the monster. If you give up being a monster because no one takes your quest maybe you get a little experience for being a monster, but only a little and only like once per day.
Most importantly, you can't become a monster unless you have the free experience. That way a person can't create a character, become a big monster, allow himself to be defeated by a friend player, and then repeat with a new character. The best you could do is to transfer some of your experience to another person. In fact, make it a loss overall by making the maximum experience output be less than the monster player put in.
You can't? It's not automatic but it's not hard to script. Here's a AppleScript script that I whipped up that could burn as many CDs as you want from a playlist, it just rotates the songs around. I haven't tested it or debugged it but it should be close.Well I have no clue on how to get HTML entities to appear properly here so just replace "& # 172;" with option-return when you are typing this into the Script Editor. Replace "& # 171;" with option-\ and "& # 187;" with shift-option-\
The point I'm making here is that this sort of copy protection on Apple's part is really just a speed bump designed to make the record labels comfortable with selling songs electronically. It's really not much of a barrier to doing what you want with the music.
Not exactly true. The measurement of calorie has had many methods to determine the value. It is sometimes measured as 1/100 of the amount of heat needed to raise 1 g of water from 0 degrees celsius to 100 degrees celcius. Other people have used the definition of the amount of heat needed to raise 1 g of water from 4 degrees celsius to 5 degrees celsius. The problem is that all of the different definitions give you slightly different sized calories. It is for this reason that in 1950 the calorie was fixed at equaling 4.184 joules. The definition of a joule is a very precise definition and by extension the calorie becomes more precisely defined.
You definiton of calorie makes a calorie equal to 4.2055 joules. This is off from the currently defined value of one calorie equalling 4.184 joules. To see a good discussion of this topic, visit this web site.
Hmm, "Slashdot, the open-source spell checker". A very interesting concept I must admit!
True the soda could warm before you drink it but for this exercise it is safe to assume that it enters your body at 4 degrees celsius. We also assume that you chug it so that the amount left in the can between sips doesn't have time to warm it. Once it is inside your body the heat transfer is pretty close to 100%. It's not that special of a situation.
A Calorie (the one used on food labels) is actually a kilocalorie. A Calorie is therefore 1000 calories. 1 calorie is basically the amount of heat needed to raise 1g of water 1 degree celsius. (A calorie is actually 1/100 of amount of heat needed to get 1 gram of water from 0 degrees C to 100 degrees C, but that works out almost the same.)
This is explained a bit on this web page.
So warming a 4 degrees C, 350mL Coke to 37 degrees C would take (37 - 4) * 350 = 11550 calories. This is 11.55 kilocalories or 11.55 Calories. The Coke has around 300 Calories in nutritive value therefore you would gain 300 - 11.55 = 288.45 Calories of energy from a 4 degrees C, 350mL can of Coke.
Yeah yeah, sue me for not being completely coherent!
I believe that I was basically trying to get across what you have said. The service provided by CD Baby is a great deal, but possibly just short of being better than a deal through a large mainstream music label. Look at it this way, with CD Baby you will almost certainly do decently but it's too small a label to really help you become a mega-star. On the other hand a major label can make you a mega-star, but it's very unlikely that you will make it huge.
It's a risk verses reward thing. CD Baby - low risk, low possibility of a huge reward. Major label - huge risk, higher possibility of a huge reward. The way things are going in the music industry I'd prefer the lower but probably more steady rewards of CD Baby rather than the higher but very uncertain rewards of a major label.
Yep competition is a good thing. The problem is that when you have a company that is a monopoly in a market and it uses that monopoly position to create a barrier to entry into that market then any other company will find it too difficult to enter into competition.
Take cars for example. Suppose Ford has a super engine that runs only on fuel made by Ford. Now Fords sell like crazy and take over the market. Years down the road the gas stations only sell Ford fuel because there are so many Ford cars. What are the chances of a new car being made that runs on Ford fuel? None, because Ford engines are the only ones that can. What are the chances that new cars come out that don't run on Ford fuel? None, because there are hardly any service stations that sell non-Ford fuel. The net result? Only Ford cars and Ford fuel are produced.
Yes, this is a simplistic example and might not be 100% real-world but it does highlight the basics behind monopolies. Right now Microsoft has a monopoly because it is the predominant operating system. If it uses that monopoly to drive out competitors in related markets, say web browsers, then it is abusing its monopolistic position.
The same thing goes if Microsoft decided to release a security update that breaks Apple's iTunes without telling anyone. Boom, iTunes starts working crappy and people blame Apple when the fault is all Microsoft. Don't think this can't happen, it has happened before with Quicktime. It was shown in internal memos that Quicktime was broken on Windows for a while because Microsoft deliberately changed a few libraries without warning.
As long as there is fair and open competition the consumer, and the companies, will benefit. If any company is allowed to squash its competition entirely then the consumer will suffer.
Heh, actually Steve Jobs already mentioned that in his presentation on Windows iTunes and iTunes Music Store 2. He basically said that they hope to sell 100 million in a year since iTunes launched and in fact they already have because of the Pepsi deal.
Gotta love how he pre-spins the story to take the wind out of the sails of the eventual detractors.
Not exactly true. It's actually not that slow to page out to the backing store. The backing store is usually a contiguous space on the hard drive and so a page out is pretty quick, hardly any seeking is needed. Not only that but there are probably a ton of pages that are not "dirty" (have changes and need to be written to the backing store before being paged out) and can be just dumped without writing them to the backing store. Most times a page out is pretty quick and painless.
Again, most of those pages probably don't need to be written to the backing store and so they will just be dumped from memory without writing to the hard drive.
Swapfiles are 80 meg files. I've rarely seen more than 1 of them on my system at a time, although I've heard of some people having 2 or 3 after running a ton of memory-intensive applications. As long as you have around 380 megs of RAM or more you probably won't see too many of these. I'd recommend 512 megs of RAM as a good solid baseline for Mac OS X, it only costs about $90 for top-quality RAM.
Freeing memory really should not take that long. That sounds like some sort of bug in Safari, probably a problem with the program shutting down gracefully. It may be creating a ton of class objects (thus the memory leak) and is failing to close those objects properly. When the program closes it then tries to close out those objects creating a logjam of sorts. This probably doesn't have much to do with the memory model of the operating system, it is most likely application-related. I would report your problems to the Safari programming team, I'm sure they would love to fix problems like this.
In Mac OS X pretty much all of memory (everything except memory that is "wired") can be paged put or re-written as needed. You can read about the Mac OS X memory management scheme here. This is also true of many Unix-like systems and other "modern" operating systems.
Right, that's why I said they were barely breaking even. They have been losing a little money previously but now they have managed to make a small profit in the last quarter. I'm sure they will do better in the future but it really doesn't matter. As long as they aren't losing boatloads of cash they are well worth it for the advertising value.
Well, depending on your definition of "first interstate highway" you would have to give that title to either the Boston Post Road or one of three roads built in the 1950's. The problem is that interstate roads didn't truly exist in a legal sense until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.
However, the Boston Post Road is widely recognized as the first major road in the United States, it has existed in one form or another since at least 1673. The El Camino Real, in comparison, has been around since about 1769.
Here's the script to do that: (AppleScript):-)
Yup and it's practically free advertising for Apple. Look at all the press they are getting. Talk about an increase in mindshare, it seems like everyone is talking about Apple and their products these days. Apple is already one of the most recognized brands out there, this will just add more fuel to the fire.
It's like the Apple Stores. The stores are barely breaking even so it would seem like they are not worth the effort but they are huge billboards for Apple and they MAKE money, not lose it. Any company would kill for an advertising campaign that actually paid for itself even before you counted in the increased sales.
Apple is very crafty and the iTunes Music Store is going to pan out big time for them.
Bug the damn music labels to get off their asses and cut deals with Apple to sell songs outside the United States. One thing for sure is that Apple would love to be able to sell to the entire world. They have all the infrastructure in place, all that needs to be done is to start the sales.
You can bet that the minute Apple gets the labels to agree to sales in other regions besides the US then Apple will start selling ASAP to those regions.
Or maybe God is just dog spelled backwards and is really the anti-dog. This could be why dogs fear thunder, it is actually the backwards sound of God saying "Bad dog! Bad dog!"
Thank you, Dr. Science...
Not to rain on the parade here, because the CD Baby deal is still awesome. Here's how it works. Artists are getting 91% of what CD Baby gets from the iTunes Music Store(iTMS). In general, Apple gets 34 cents from each 99 cent track, leaving CD Baby with 65 cents.
65 cents * 91% = 59 cents to the artist.
Now the artist has to pay CD Baby $40 up front to process a CD. So the artist starts out $40 in the hole. After selling 68 songs on iTMS the artist has made back the $40 and goes into the black. Since a CD probably has around 11 tracks on it, that is 6 CDs worth of songs. Not bad at all.
So iTMS and CD Baby absolutely rocks for an independent artist. It's almost definitely better than going the conventional route of getting a major label to press CDs and promote you.
Yeah man, get it right, It's Internet Exploiter, not Internet Exploder. Sheesh.
Fair enough. I totally agree with you, it is much better to talk about the positive of the new system rather then the negative of what you are currently using.
So what does a Mac give you?
- Consistency in design. The vast majority, if not all, of Mac programs use a virtually identical user interface. This means that key command shortcuts, menu placement, preference panels, button layout, etc. are almost always the same between applications. Pretty much once you use one or two programs on the Mac you learn the basics of using any program. It is very cool to sit down at a very complicated program and already know where to find stuff. None of this "Now where did they hide the damn preferences." or "How the hell do I get help on how to use this program."
- Easy device setup. Devices are almost instantly available when they are plugged in. You only rarely need to load a driver, most devices just work without any software or rebooting.
- Easy installation. For most programs you just pop in the disk and drag the program to your Applications folder. If you want to move a program you just move it, pretty much every application on the Macintosh won't break if it is in a non-standard location.
- Compatibility. Samba, NFS, Rendezvous, Fat32, HFS+, SSH, and a billion other acronyms and protocols are supported on the Mac. If it is an open standard chances are that you can connect to it using a Mac. Not only that but every revision of Mac OS X just gets more complete in its compatability.
- Posix compliance, standard Unix-type shell environments. Bash, csh, tcsh, and several other shells work just fine on Mac OS X. Most programs written for Linux, the various BSDs and other Unix-like environments will work with just a quick re-compile. There are a couple of major package management programs out there that have already put everything together for Mac OS X and have terminal and GUI programs to easily install programs.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I feel that Mac OS X is a great melding of traditional terminal-based Unix and a smart and easy GUI. I feel that I get more work done more easily on Mac OS X, where the operating system gets out of my way and lets me do my work as easily as possible. I spend pretty much no time fighting my system and instead I get to focus on the task at hand. I am able to do this without sacrificing power and flexibility. If I need to run the terminal in order to easily grep through a document I can do so in a second. If I need to ssh into my server at work it takes me no time at all. The list goes on.
So continue to use Windows or try Mac OS X, it's up to you. I have made my choice and that choice is Macintosh.
Heh, I've heard people say that the Visualizer is perfect for watching when you get stoned. I wouldn't know because I've never gotten stoned, but I would assume that it is true. The closest I've gotten to a similar state was looking at the Visualizer after a few days without sleep. It was very mesmerizing, it almost puts you into a trance. A very cool effect for sure.