As Thunderbolt is basically an external PCIe x4 port + DisplayPort, the article basically says that USB is better than PCIe. That doesn't make any sense.
Thunderbolt will enable a few things that might be extremely useful, like docking stations that are not tied to a specific laptop model, external GPUs and lots of other things.
You don't have to use names for your parameters if you're writing your own classes. [myClassObject method:foo:bar:baz:foobarbaz] can be used if you declare the method that way. Also, runMethod:foo in your example is a bit misleading, because it doesn't mean "run a method called foo", but actually "run a method called runMethod:withParam:andHeresAnotherParm:ohWaitOneMore with parameters foo,bar,baz,foobarbaz]".
Of course, you can't get around the long names if you want to use any pre-existing frameworks...
And a $200 desktop pc can beat his $200 laptop, if you don't care about the specific characteristics of a laptop anyway. Which is just the point here: Sure, if your use case requires a laptop or works best with a laptop, then by all means get a laptop! This whiny article basically boils down to "Why would anyone buy a convertible when a pickup truck is much better at hauling stuff and usually cheaper?". It doesn't make any sense.
Tablets are less versatile than laptops but seem to work nicely for a lot of people in a lot of cases. Don't get one if what you actually want is a laptop.
I have an Intel X25-M SSD in my Mac Pro and use an OCZ Vertex 2 in my Macbook. Both work very well, although the OCZ feels faster. One thing to watch out for though, is the way firmware updates are handled: Intel offers a bootable ISO image that will update the firmware very easily and without any hassles whatsoever.
OCZ on the other hand only offers an.EXE tool (32bit only!) that needs an Internet connection and only works if your SSD has an MBR partition style and at least one NTFS formatted partition on it. This makes updating the firmware on my Macbook (which has no Windows partition and uses a GUID partitioning scheme) a nightmare that requires a total wipe + installing a Windows system with Internet access.
Given that firmware updates for SSDs where at some point necessary to ensure data integrity (The Vertex had a bad firmware that produced lockups at some point, e.g.), this whole process just sucks.
I don't have a mobile device that can play Flash content, but maybe someone who has one knows this: How does Flash content react to knowing that it's run on a mobile device with a touch screen? Does ist serve a specialized UI that is suitable for touch input without a styles like many mobile web sites do now?
A lot of Flash content is already quite hard to use on a desktop (non-standard scroll bars, fixed resolution etc.)... I would hate to have the same user interface on a touch device with a small screen...
Some of those, like Monkey Island and Benath a Steel Sky, are available for iOS and work quite well, although IMHO the iPhone is a bit too small for the kind of pixel hunting they sometimes require. The iPad is ideal for adventure games, though.
I still don't quite see the major differences between Vista and 7 that make Vista a demon from hell and 7 the OS of the savior. 7 improved on a few annoyances of Vista and added nice features to the task bar that make it a bit more OS-X-dock-like, which is nice, but I don't see that as a revolution.
The main difference is that while most drivers for Vista were bad, because they were rushed, by now they have matured enough to not be troublesome anymore. But is that really an advantage of 7?
I'm not comfortable with people who think it's ok to continue to have intercourse if one of the partners says "no, please stop", even if there's no physical force.
I'm not saying the word "rape" is necessarily the correct word to use, but it's definitely criminal.
So how do you organize your music? In a Artist/Album/TrackName.mp3 scheme?
I very often search for meta data in my library, like "all songs by that artist that were released in the 90s" or something. iTunes makes it extremely easy to do just that. It even allows for dynamic playlists that update according to several criteria you can set (like a "Top 20 of the last six months" playlist). And it all syncs automatically to my iPhone.
Without iTunes, I would have to organize the files in the file system myself. I would need a third party tool to rip my CDs, possibly another tool to manage ID3 tags, hopefully with automatic import from Gracenote. Searching and organizing those tags might need another tool, or maybe could be done using the file management tools of whatever OS you like. I don't see how that is easier than just installing iTunes and being done.
I can see how a simple file system approach might be preferable if you don't need to search meta data all the time, or if transfering music to and *back* from the device is important to you, but I vastly prefer the iTunes way.
It's the Palestinian authorities that are acting like lunatics here. The very fact that they have much much bigger troubles like helping their citizens survive under all the pressure means that they shouldn't waste their time prosecuting people for being critical of Islam.
It seems like they have their priorities mixed up and that makes it a question of freedom.
Has the submitter even read the original story at Ars?
It is about a unification of the APIs where new features from iOS should appear in OS X. This is not at all about DRM or the App Store.
Most 40 hour games nowadays are just 10 hour games which you are supposed to play four times using different characters, changing the story slightly every time.
That doesn't really count as 40 hours for me at least.
I can think of at least one way it might - the Higgs Boson is critical to our understanding gravity.
This is a common misconception. The Higgs mechanism only generates the current masses, it does not connect at all to General Relativity, which is the connection we'd need to understanding gravity in a quantum context.
Also, matter is usually made up of composite structures, like protons / neutrons, atoms etc. These masses are largely explained by bound states, the Higgs mechanism only makes up for a small percentage of the masses of those objects.
The Higgs mechanism is very interesting in the framework of particle theory, but it does not help with gravity and it certainly does not explain how the masses of all matter objects are generated.
There are no neutral muons.
The energy loss due to synchrotron radiaten is only a problem with electrons, the larger mass of the muons pretty much completely takes care of the problem. The radiation loss due to synchrotron radiation is negligible for muons.
The article, and the summary, is a bit misleading.
There are always many different designs being investigated, even up to fairly advanced stages. This doesn't mean that any of those is going to be build. You have to realize that in order to make decisions that cost several M$, you have to know what you can do and how to achieve it beforehand, in great detail.
CLIC is definitely one of the bigger things currently in investigation. The ILC (lepton machine) is another one. There's also big interest in Neutrino Factories, Superbeams, Betabeams, etc.
What we want to build (maybe in 2020) depends crucially on what the LHC finds and on new results in the neutrino sector (measurement of the 13-angle).
I'm not sure how Windows does it, but OS X shows a little "Caps Lock" symbol inside the password input field whenever caps lock is on to prevent exactly that.
Yes, you're right, of course, and he might just mean that.
What he describes happens, just as physicists sometimes develop a model to describe some natural phenomenon and end up discovering new math that is then later adopted by mathematicians.
But in both cases, I wouldn't describe that as the main purpose of the field. Physicists usually don't deal with pure math, mathematicians do. And mathematicians don't usually deal with observation, physicists do.
If you can observe phenomena, reliably document previously unobserved phenomena, and from that produce useful but not mathematically precise practices or products you're a scientist.
If you can gather observed facts into a sheaf of postulates and a system of symbols that can predict unobserved phenomena, you're a mathematician....
Both describe a (natural) scientist. Mathematicians do entirely different things (they don't work with observed facts, they don't make postulates based on said facts, they definitely don't predict unobserved phenomena. That's all what science is for).
It would work like it does today: There are always two officers in a car, one to do something to your disadvantage, maybe illegal, and the other one to lie for him.
It's not the way it's supposed to work, but just get into an accident with a police car and see what happens...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure. Every research institute or university has access to pretty much all relevant journals through site contracts.
It also has Grapher.app, which is actually quite an amazing little plot program (also does differential equations and vector plots).
As Thunderbolt is basically an external PCIe x4 port + DisplayPort, the article basically says that USB is better than PCIe. That doesn't make any sense. Thunderbolt will enable a few things that might be extremely useful, like docking stations that are not tied to a specific laptop model, external GPUs and lots of other things.
make install_on_device?
Of course, you can't get around the long names if you want to use any pre-existing frameworks...
Tablets are less versatile than laptops but seem to work nicely for a lot of people in a lot of cases. Don't get one if what you actually want is a laptop.
OCZ on the other hand only offers an .EXE tool (32bit only!) that needs an Internet connection and only works if your SSD has an MBR partition style and at least one NTFS formatted partition on it. This makes updating the firmware on my Macbook (which has no Windows partition and uses a GUID partitioning scheme) a nightmare that requires a total wipe + installing a Windows system with Internet access.
Given that firmware updates for SSDs where at some point necessary to ensure data integrity (The Vertex had a bad firmware that produced lockups at some point, e.g.), this whole process just sucks.
A lot of Flash content is already quite hard to use on a desktop (non-standard scroll bars, fixed resolution etc.)... I would hate to have the same user interface on a touch device with a small screen...
Some of those, like Monkey Island and Benath a Steel Sky, are available for iOS and work quite well, although IMHO the iPhone is a bit too small for the kind of pixel hunting they sometimes require. The iPad is ideal for adventure games, though.
The main difference is that while most drivers for Vista were bad, because they were rushed, by now they have matured enough to not be troublesome anymore. But is that really an advantage of 7?
I'm not comfortable with people who think it's ok to continue to have intercourse if one of the partners says "no, please stop", even if there's no physical force. I'm not saying the word "rape" is necessarily the correct word to use, but it's definitely criminal.
I very often search for meta data in my library, like "all songs by that artist that were released in the 90s" or something. iTunes makes it extremely easy to do just that. It even allows for dynamic playlists that update according to several criteria you can set (like a "Top 20 of the last six months" playlist). And it all syncs automatically to my iPhone.
Without iTunes, I would have to organize the files in the file system myself. I would need a third party tool to rip my CDs, possibly another tool to manage ID3 tags, hopefully with automatic import from Gracenote. Searching and organizing those tags might need another tool, or maybe could be done using the file management tools of whatever OS you like. I don't see how that is easier than just installing iTunes and being done.
I can see how a simple file system approach might be preferable if you don't need to search meta data all the time, or if transfering music to and *back* from the device is important to you, but I vastly prefer the iTunes way.
It's the Palestinian authorities that are acting like lunatics here. The very fact that they have much much bigger troubles like helping their citizens survive under all the pressure means that they shouldn't waste their time prosecuting people for being critical of Islam. It seems like they have their priorities mixed up and that makes it a question of freedom.
The size of the keyboard is the same on all Apple laptops.
SVG content makes up just 0.106% of all Web content, by my rough estimation.
Wow, that guy's rough estimates are up at the permille level. Impressive.
Has the submitter even read the original story at Ars? It is about a unification of the APIs where new features from iOS should appear in OS X. This is not at all about DRM or the App Store.
Most 40 hour games nowadays are just 10 hour games which you are supposed to play four times using different characters, changing the story slightly every time. That doesn't really count as 40 hours for me at least.
I can think of at least one way it might - the Higgs Boson is critical to our understanding gravity.
This is a common misconception. The Higgs mechanism only generates the current masses, it does not connect at all to General Relativity, which is the connection we'd need to understanding gravity in a quantum context.
Also, matter is usually made up of composite structures, like protons / neutrons, atoms etc. These masses are largely explained by bound states, the Higgs mechanism only makes up for a small percentage of the masses of those objects.
The Higgs mechanism is very interesting in the framework of particle theory, but it does not help with gravity and it certainly does not explain how the masses of all matter objects are generated.
There are no neutral muons. The energy loss due to synchrotron radiaten is only a problem with electrons, the larger mass of the muons pretty much completely takes care of the problem. The radiation loss due to synchrotron radiation is negligible for muons.
There are always many different designs being investigated, even up to fairly advanced stages. This doesn't mean that any of those is going to be build. You have to realize that in order to make decisions that cost several M$, you have to know what you can do and how to achieve it beforehand, in great detail.
CLIC is definitely one of the bigger things currently in investigation. The ILC (lepton machine) is another one. There's also big interest in Neutrino Factories, Superbeams, Betabeams, etc.
What we want to build (maybe in 2020) depends crucially on what the LHC finds and on new results in the neutrino sector (measurement of the 13-angle).
Pretty much all music you buy from the Store nowadays is DRM free and doesn't require iTunes to play back (they call it "iTunes Plus").
I'm not sure how Windows does it, but OS X shows a little "Caps Lock" symbol inside the password input field whenever caps lock is on to prevent exactly that.
What he describes happens, just as physicists sometimes develop a model to describe some natural phenomenon and end up discovering new math that is then later adopted by mathematicians.
But in both cases, I wouldn't describe that as the main purpose of the field. Physicists usually don't deal with pure math, mathematicians do. And mathematicians don't usually deal with observation, physicists do.
...
If you can observe phenomena, reliably document previously unobserved phenomena, and from that produce useful but not mathematically precise practices or products you're a scientist.
If you can gather observed facts into a sheaf of postulates and a system of symbols that can predict unobserved phenomena, you're a mathematician....
Both describe a (natural) scientist. Mathematicians do entirely different things (they don't work with observed facts, they don't make postulates based on said facts, they definitely don't predict unobserved phenomena. That's all what science is for).
It would work like it does today: There are always two officers in a car, one to do something to your disadvantage, maybe illegal, and the other one to lie for him. It's not the way it's supposed to work, but just get into an accident with a police car and see what happens...