Probably. Despite the supposedly altruistic reasons it had for entering WW2, the US benefitted positioned itself to make a killing after the war and did so with a vengeance.
The US after WW2 became a culture of selfishness and exclusive personal ownership: my car, my stereo, my house. Among my friends (heart of silicon valley, all 19-25), it might end up looking more like what you say. Most of my friends live with family still and will for quite a while. I'm building an addition for myself to live in. I've got a great job, but screw apartments, and screw having a car.
I see a large social change happening, but I don't see the government doing what it takes to make people live well (building mass transit, encouraging education to help us stay competitive and making staple foods cheap and other things which generally encourage thriftiness); rather, they're fighting against it and making it harder for people to live.
I am quite far from swallowing the RIAA's load. I mostly listen to bands on independent labels. I figured out that the RIAA's music sucks five years ago and never looked back.
It took no less than two reinstalls before one of my friends figured out that Kazaa really was the reason her computer was slow, despite my protests.
On another note, I do the following to avoid infection/spyware: uninstall all of Dell's bloatware, install symantec client security, firefox, thunderbird. Never had a problem. I don't know why somebody can't just throw that setup on a ghost cd and make a bundle by distributing pcs configured for better security off the line.
I wouldn't be sounding the funeral bells yet. There was a slashdot post a while ago which talked about how the next-gen console CPUs plain suck. Furthermore, while the PC platform is definately under stress due to viruses and price competition, most people like a separation between work and play.
This is part of the reason why they're "pulling their punches," as you say. The playstation is for the kids to horse around on to keep them busy so I can do work or just plain geek out. Hell, when I'm multislacking it's nice to have Soul Calibur in one hand and/. in the other.
Furthermore, consider that the two big players in consoles also have a vested interest in the sale of PCs. Add to that the fact that high definition televisions and monitors have completely different standards (HDTV vs DVI). I would like nothing better than to play the next Soul Calibur on a 30" cinema display, but I don't think it's going to happen without an expensive video capture device.
The lack of fundamentals is something which I continually abhorr. I didn't find it too much in secondary and post-secondary math, but in language it was absurd.
I was taught the basics of grammar no less than four times. I sat through lectures on the basics of poetic scansion in every class I had which dealt with poetry. I've been graded down by graduate students because they didn't know fuckall about verse, only to be given an A by the professor.
The reason for this, of course, is that most of these people get by writing about their feelings, typical whiny-liberal diatribes on opression, and psychoanalytic/sociological garbage. Hell, half of the reason I studied Literature was because I was frusterated by the quantity of boobs out there who refuse to see the words on the page, or see them in the context of being a valley girl in the 21st century rather than a upper-middle class lit fan in the 19th. For the last time, Herman Melville was a gushing liberal in his day, and so was Mark Twain!
And they're taught to think like this by our teachers, who for the most part couldn't tell a cesura from a hole in the ground. You are, by and large, graded by how well you agree with what the teacher says, not whether you actually absorb anything (What's a trochiac foot?). So, don't teach them what to believe, do teach them to think, accept, question, and see the world (including books) for what it is rather than for what you want it to be.
On a completely different note, I think there should be a greater variety of electives in secondary school, with less emphasis on the futile cause of beating the same knowledge into the heads of children over and over. For three years, the only courses I took were math, science, english, history, spanish, and PE. I would've killed for a metal shop course, a real programming class and more art.
I agree that they'd probably come out ahead. However, in one of the past articles (think it was posted on/. ) the author claimed that Apple always makes conservative estimates of sales, then runs into product shortages because fab'ing chips takes time, and IBM only builds to order. Essentially, they don't feel a liberal estimate and a consequential price reduction's are justifiable risks to take given their market position. Their share has been historically small, which makes them count pennies anyway, and they have some hard-won gains in the past 4 years they're not about to give up.
But again, I agree that they're being penny wise and pound foolish. There are a lot of poor folks out there who want a mac but don't want it chugging along at 1.3ghz.
Hopefully, though, Intel will either fill orders with stock on hand or just fab everything a lot quicker.
I don't get it. If the major cost difference is the G5 processor vs. the Pentium 4, I would expect a Mac with a P4 processor to cost less than a Mac with a G5.
You're probably right. They will likely pass on the cost savings they get by switching from IBM to Intel (Screw the P4, I'm still hoping for those 64 bits myself).
However, I don't think an Apple desktop will ever be less expensive than a Dell. Based purely on my observations, Apple does much more business in laptops than PowerMacs, and given all the times I've heard Pentium M, it seems this is a fact. The mere fact that they sell fewer desktops means that they have to be proportionally more expensive per unit, because they have to offset fixed costs like R&D and marketing.
I speculate that the high price of the PowerMacs is also related to the fact that they don't want to order too many G5 chips at a time because it could mean a potential loss, while they know certain professionals will always buy the latest Mac. Keeping the supply low inflates the price. If Intel is able to fill orders faster or with stock on hand, then the price of workstation Macs could fall.
Question: After the Intel switch, what will they call PowerBooks/PowerMacs?
Certain Dells last. The 4100s are built like freakin' tanks. My experience with the 8300 series has been less than stellar, and going through their clueless, outsourced tech support staff to get something replaced is a nightmare (which makes getting anything out of their 'great' warrenties a particularly cruel joke).
Agreed. I always found myself playing devil's advocate for Nixon in civics classes. However, I think he's right in essence. A more accurate description of the current state of affairs is probably to say "We are currently seeing Reganomics come to its full fruition, wed with Cold War-style Capitalist/Democratic zealotry."
One, because of policies such as bankruptcy 'reform,' putting the thumbscrews on waitresses while giving more breaks to the ultra-rich and letting companies outsource millions of jobs to India. Two, because we're waging a war to bring a brand of freedom to a state which was better off under dictatorship.
I did most of my upper division coursework in English Literature, where, to my surprise, one of my profs used and advocated FOSS. On the other hand, another professor was still using Wordperfect for DOS. My Japanese art prof did everything in.docs, and it worked OK for the most part. I took a class in Latin taught by a grad student, and she was should've known something about pdfs - her diacriticals kept getting eaten up.
So it just depends on what field you're in, as a function of how likely the person is to be interested in technology for its own sake, and whether there are distinct advantages to be had in using PDF - as there are would be for a japanese language prof.
Partially agreed. Like it or not, having tats that are not easily concealed is labelling yourself as part of the 'counterculture,' which is okay at most liberal nonprofits (such as PETA), and a few very progressive businesses. However, those types of people are likely not going to be happy working for a big, evil corporation anyway.
If by some small chance you have extensive body mods and are a young Republican, you should have your head examined. It's like wearing a marijuana leaf shirt.
We should count ourselves lucky that we can wear jeans and t-shirts to work, for the most part. I feel sorry for those guys on the east coast who have to run around in suit jackets all day long.
I wind up exporting to DOC, and the formatting has been screwed up in a couple of situations (often at inconvenient times, like when I need to turn a paper in and I find out in the lab, I learned quickly after the 1st one)...
I usually export to pdf from OO.org. It seems to do that pretty flawlessly. Of course, that poses its own challenges if you're emailing a professor, depending on how savvy they are.
In speed and resources, Open Office comes out ahead, but the issues I have stem more from compatability (and exporting, mostly)
I add that the visual appearance of the application is a big hurdle for a lot of users. For instance, on three occasions I've installed OO.org on other people's machines (two colleagues and my mother). On all occasions, they judged the underlying functionality by its presentation before they had even typed a word, and found somebody to provide a pirated copy of Office 2003.
I acknowledge that they use their vertical integration to get money and subsidize their great software. However, this is not to say their hardware is worthless. They produce fantasitic, elegant products.
I believe your words and many others are a symptom of one thing: a desire to run OS X on your $500 Dell. OS X has been running on Intel for years now, and they are no closer to letting it run on vanilla boxes than they were in 2001.
A lot of people are undermodded and shouting this out, but I will do my service to add to the chorus: there's a lot more to a good system than a good processor. Apple's mobos have gobs of memory bandwidth in every direction. And while I'm at it: No, this does not mean your doorly-pesigned Dell will run OSX.
If they go a sane route and stay with OpenBoot or similar, they will still need video cards that don't depend on ugly PC BIOS, so they are still unlikely to be kings of 3D.
Just plain wrong. They've got the top-of-the-line 3d cards in their systems. The reason they can't keep up is because (look at any faq on Doom3 performance on a Mac) of quirks like float to int conversions (expensive on PPC, not on x86), GCC, and the developer's refusal to optimize for PPC and dual processors. Most 3d games are still single-threaded. By contrast, the Mac Quake3 outperforms x86 Quake3, but that's because somebody took the time to optimize for it. Now these specific optimizations will not be as necessary. Apple still has one big edge: most of its apps have been taking advantage of dual processors for years, and many Wintel applications do not.
With a higher threshold of publication quality the 80% of the crap in your field that you neither want to read nor have time to read is likely to be filtered out. Due to the "publish or perish" situation most researchers find themselves in, some who are very bright publish more often than they should, many who shouldn't publish at all do, and most publish sexy research rather than good research. Also, internet articles are not necessarily peer reviewed at all, whereas with journals this is most likely.
Oh, and don't ask rhetorical questions if you're trying to make a point (unless you go on to answer that question), and using ???!!#$%!@# garbage makes you sound like an idiot. That's the kind of trash that makes me prefer periodicals in the first place.
Say I'm an employee of Corporation X. My job, first and foremost, is to do everything I can to make buttloads of money for X's shareholders, be that in increasing revenue, decreasing costs, or inflating the stock price.
Conversely, if I do something in your spare time, say, while blogging, which injures your company, my ass is on the grill. Hell, they could even roast me for due diligence if I fail to do something, say, remove somebody's negative comment on a highly public blog under my immediate control.
It's pretty screwed up, I know, but that's the game. Don't look at it so much as a corporation subverting a media form, or murdering the truth, but rather a corporation doing exactly what a corporation's sole purpose (making money) prescribes.
I agree, and would add that for a publisher of tech manuals to start putting out this kind of celebrity drivel is bad form. I don't know if making manuals is their only business, and granted they aren't that straight-laced to begin with, but come on.
Besides, most people don't go to Apple retail stores to buy books, they go there to buy Macs, so this is really more of a slap on the wrist than anything else.
I know the poet's version of the law, that the number of transistors doubles every year, but why do people make such a fuss about it other than the fact that it's a nice little prediction? That is: Ok, we've observed this dynamic; does it have any practical implications whatsoever?
Looking at this in the context of SCO v. IBM, their larger strategy is to shift the advantage away from the plaintiff/patent applicant/aggressor: play defense, stay on top. Here, the patent applicant defnitely has the advantage, since the patent is granted without thorough review. They're lobbying to make it harder to get a patent in general, to the larger effect of weeding out frivolous patents. In SCO, I can only hope, they will make it so that things like "facts" and "evidence" are required of the plaintiff.
Therefore, you have no reason to suspect them of bait n' switch with the OS community. They're just playing defense in order to maintain their corporate hugeness. In this case, the effect is moot with respect to open source proles, because ideally a good patent will still go through. In copyright law, it might become harder to establish that somebody has in fact stolen your code. While I really want SCO v. IBM to be decided in IBM's favor, and therefore Linux's, see PearOS/CherryOS for why this could be bad.
That's probably the best balance between efficiency and the whims of the consumer you'd get. One of my civil engineering buddies from England once explained to me that American homebuilding is probably the most wasteful, inefficient ways of erecting a structure concievable. If you think about it, it hasn't really changed much since at least the Victorian era (I'm sitting in a 1910 Victorian right now).
Two caveats. One: The Victorian illustrates just what you're talking about. A lot of Vic's are the same in overall design, but differing in little details such as a round turret vs a hexagonal, different columns, pediments, etc. That was good for them then, and it'll probably be good now. So what you'd need is a fairly large set of prototypes with different facades. Two (this is the big one): Different geographical areas have different requirements. For instance, wooden houses dominate California because there are earthquakes and the structure needs to flex a little. I'm no civil engineer, but can a machine work wood reliably enough for this context? All my factory-produced furniture is particle board.
I have a lot of gripes with the shuttle. If we ever seriously want to get into space, we need something less Industrial Revolution, something that's reusable and doesn't involve burning a metric assload of solid fuel and tend to cataclysmically explode.
However, those shuttles represent billions upon billions of dollars. Sure, all the blue-sky types at NASA want something more reliable, sustainable and smaller. However, in the current "budgetary climate," as they say, with Bush trying to start World War III with Islam and the economy still dusting itself off, your chances of getting Congress to authorize a new project are slightly less than zero. The shuttles are the only toys NASA has, and if they break, they're not going to get new ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably. Despite the supposedly altruistic reasons it had for entering WW2, the US benefitted positioned itself to make a killing after the war and did so with a vengeance.
The US after WW2 became a culture of selfishness and exclusive personal ownership: my car, my stereo, my house. Among my friends (heart of silicon valley, all 19-25), it might end up looking more like what you say. Most of my friends live with family still and will for quite a while. I'm building an addition for myself to live in. I've got a great job, but screw apartments, and screw having a car.
I see a large social change happening, but I don't see the government doing what it takes to make people live well (building mass transit, encouraging education to help us stay competitive and making staple foods cheap and other things which generally encourage thriftiness); rather, they're fighting against it and making it harder for people to live.
I am quite far from swallowing the RIAA's load. I mostly listen to bands on independent labels. I figured out that the RIAA's music sucks five years ago and never looked back.
I don't watch tv.
My best friend manages a theater.
It took no less than two reinstalls before one of my friends figured out that Kazaa really was the reason her computer was slow, despite my protests.
On another note, I do the following to avoid infection/spyware: uninstall all of Dell's bloatware, install symantec client security, firefox, thunderbird. Never had a problem. I don't know why somebody can't just throw that setup on a ghost cd and make a bundle by distributing pcs configured for better security off the line.
I wouldn't be sounding the funeral bells yet. There was a slashdot post a while ago which talked about how the next-gen console CPUs plain suck. Furthermore, while the PC platform is definately under stress due to viruses and price competition, most people like a separation between work and play.
This is part of the reason why they're "pulling their punches," as you say. The playstation is for the kids to horse around on to keep them busy so I can do work or just plain geek out. Hell, when I'm multislacking it's nice to have Soul Calibur in one hand and /. in the other.
Furthermore, consider that the two big players in consoles also have a vested interest in the sale of PCs. Add to that the fact that high definition televisions and monitors have completely different standards (HDTV vs DVI). I would like nothing better than to play the next Soul Calibur on a 30" cinema display, but I don't think it's going to happen without an expensive video capture device.
The lack of fundamentals is something which I continually abhorr. I didn't find it too much in secondary and post-secondary math, but in language it was absurd.
I was taught the basics of grammar no less than four times. I sat through lectures on the basics of poetic scansion in every class I had which dealt with poetry. I've been graded down by graduate students because they didn't know fuckall about verse, only to be given an A by the professor.
The reason for this, of course, is that most of these people get by writing about their feelings, typical whiny-liberal diatribes on opression, and psychoanalytic/sociological garbage. Hell, half of the reason I studied Literature was because I was frusterated by the quantity of boobs out there who refuse to see the words on the page, or see them in the context of being a valley girl in the 21st century rather than a upper-middle class lit fan in the 19th. For the last time, Herman Melville was a gushing liberal in his day, and so was Mark Twain!
And they're taught to think like this by our teachers, who for the most part couldn't tell a cesura from a hole in the ground. You are, by and large, graded by how well you agree with what the teacher says, not whether you actually absorb anything (What's a trochiac foot?). So, don't teach them what to believe, do teach them to think, accept, question, and see the world (including books) for what it is rather than for what you want it to be.
On a completely different note, I think there should be a greater variety of electives in secondary school, with less emphasis on the futile cause of beating the same knowledge into the heads of children over and over. For three years, the only courses I took were math, science, english, history, spanish, and PE. I would've killed for a metal shop course, a real programming class and more art.
I agree that they'd probably come out ahead. However, in one of the past articles (think it was posted on /. ) the author claimed that Apple always makes conservative estimates of sales, then runs into product shortages because fab'ing chips takes time, and IBM only builds to order. Essentially, they don't feel a liberal estimate and a consequential price reduction's are justifiable risks to take given their market position. Their share has been historically small, which makes them count pennies anyway, and they have some hard-won gains in the past 4 years they're not about to give up.
But again, I agree that they're being penny wise and pound foolish. There are a lot of poor folks out there who want a mac but don't want it chugging along at 1.3ghz.
Hopefully, though, Intel will either fill orders with stock on hand or just fab everything a lot quicker.
You're probably right. They will likely pass on the cost savings they get by switching from IBM to Intel (Screw the P4, I'm still hoping for those 64 bits myself).
However, I don't think an Apple desktop will ever be less expensive than a Dell. Based purely on my observations, Apple does much more business in laptops than PowerMacs, and given all the times I've heard Pentium M, it seems this is a fact. The mere fact that they sell fewer desktops means that they have to be proportionally more expensive per unit, because they have to offset fixed costs like R&D and marketing.
I speculate that the high price of the PowerMacs is also related to the fact that they don't want to order too many G5 chips at a time because it could mean a potential loss, while they know certain professionals will always buy the latest Mac. Keeping the supply low inflates the price. If Intel is able to fill orders faster or with stock on hand, then the price of workstation Macs could fall.
Question: After the Intel switch, what will they call PowerBooks/PowerMacs?
Certain Dells last. The 4100s are built like freakin' tanks. My experience with the 8300 series has been less than stellar, and going through their clueless, outsourced tech support staff to get something replaced is a nightmare (which makes getting anything out of their 'great' warrenties a particularly cruel joke).
Agreed. I always found myself playing devil's advocate for Nixon in civics classes. However, I think he's right in essence. A more accurate description of the current state of affairs is probably to say "We are currently seeing Reganomics come to its full fruition, wed with Cold War-style Capitalist/Democratic zealotry."
One, because of policies such as bankruptcy 'reform,' putting the thumbscrews on waitresses while giving more breaks to the ultra-rich and letting companies outsource millions of jobs to India. Two, because we're waging a war to bring a brand of freedom to a state which was better off under dictatorship.
I did most of my upper division coursework in English Literature, where, to my surprise, one of my profs used and advocated FOSS. On the other hand, another professor was still using Wordperfect for DOS. My Japanese art prof did everything in .docs, and it worked OK for the most part. I took a class in Latin taught by a grad student, and she was should've known something about pdfs - her diacriticals kept getting eaten up.
So it just depends on what field you're in, as a function of how likely the person is to be interested in technology for its own sake, and whether there are distinct advantages to be had in using PDF - as there are would be for a japanese language prof.
Partially agreed. Like it or not, having tats that are not easily concealed is labelling yourself as part of the 'counterculture,' which is okay at most liberal nonprofits (such as PETA), and a few very progressive businesses. However, those types of people are likely not going to be happy working for a big, evil corporation anyway.
If by some small chance you have extensive body mods and are a young Republican, you should have your head examined. It's like wearing a marijuana leaf shirt.
We should count ourselves lucky that we can wear jeans and t-shirts to work, for the most part. I feel sorry for those guys on the east coast who have to run around in suit jackets all day long.
I usually export to pdf from OO.org. It seems to do that pretty flawlessly. Of course, that poses its own challenges if you're emailing a professor, depending on how savvy they are.
I add that the visual appearance of the application is a big hurdle for a lot of users. For instance, on three occasions I've installed OO.org on other people's machines (two colleagues and my mother). On all occasions, they judged the underlying functionality by its presentation before they had even typed a word, and found somebody to provide a pirated copy of Office 2003.
I acknowledge that they use their vertical integration to get money and subsidize their great software. However, this is not to say their hardware is worthless. They produce fantasitic, elegant products.
I believe your words and many others are a symptom of one thing: a desire to run OS X on your $500 Dell. OS X has been running on Intel for years now, and they are no closer to letting it run on vanilla boxes than they were in 2001.
Just plain wrong. They've got the top-of-the-line 3d cards in their systems. The reason they can't keep up is because (look at any faq on Doom3 performance on a Mac) of quirks like float to int conversions (expensive on PPC, not on x86), GCC, and the developer's refusal to optimize for PPC and dual processors. Most 3d games are still single-threaded. By contrast, the Mac Quake3 outperforms x86 Quake3, but that's because somebody took the time to optimize for it. Now these specific optimizations will not be as necessary. Apple still has one big edge: most of its apps have been taking advantage of dual processors for years, and many Wintel applications do not.
At least at my university, AIM is the way chatting is done. I've never even been given an MSN/Yahoo handle by an acquaintance.
With a higher threshold of publication quality the 80% of the crap in your field that you neither want to read nor have time to read is likely to be filtered out. Due to the "publish or perish" situation most researchers find themselves in, some who are very bright publish more often than they should, many who shouldn't publish at all do, and most publish sexy research rather than good research. Also, internet articles are not necessarily peer reviewed at all, whereas with journals this is most likely.
Oh, and don't ask rhetorical questions if you're trying to make a point (unless you go on to answer that question), and using ???!!#$%!@# garbage makes you sound like an idiot. That's the kind of trash that makes me prefer periodicals in the first place.
Say I'm an employee of Corporation X. My job, first and foremost, is to do everything I can to make buttloads of money for X's shareholders, be that in increasing revenue, decreasing costs, or inflating the stock price.
Conversely, if I do something in your spare time, say, while blogging, which injures your company, my ass is on the grill. Hell, they could even roast me for due diligence if I fail to do something, say, remove somebody's negative comment on a highly public blog under my immediate control.
It's pretty screwed up, I know, but that's the game. Don't look at it so much as a corporation subverting a media form, or murdering the truth, but rather a corporation doing exactly what a corporation's sole purpose (making money) prescribes.
God, somebody's already said this, but nobody's pointing to Econ 101: Any increase in aggregate supply lowers prices. Period.
I agree, and would add that for a publisher of tech manuals to start putting out this kind of celebrity drivel is bad form. I don't know if making manuals is their only business, and granted they aren't that straight-laced to begin with, but come on.
Besides, most people don't go to Apple retail stores to buy books, they go there to buy Macs, so this is really more of a slap on the wrist than anything else.
My word processor doesn't lag. I use emacs.
Those aren't rhetorical questions, they're actual questions. I really am curious.
I know the poet's version of the law, that the number of transistors doubles every year, but why do people make such a fuss about it other than the fact that it's a nice little prediction? That is: Ok, we've observed this dynamic; does it have any practical implications whatsoever?
Looking at this in the context of SCO v. IBM, their larger strategy is to shift the advantage away from the plaintiff/patent applicant/aggressor: play defense, stay on top. Here, the patent applicant defnitely has the advantage, since the patent is granted without thorough review. They're lobbying to make it harder to get a patent in general, to the larger effect of weeding out frivolous patents. In SCO, I can only hope, they will make it so that things like "facts" and "evidence" are required of the plaintiff.
Therefore, you have no reason to suspect them of bait n' switch with the OS community. They're just playing defense in order to maintain their corporate hugeness. In this case, the effect is moot with respect to open source proles, because ideally a good patent will still go through. In copyright law, it might become harder to establish that somebody has in fact stolen your code. While I really want SCO v. IBM to be decided in IBM's favor, and therefore Linux's, see PearOS/CherryOS for why this could be bad.
That's probably the best balance between efficiency and the whims of the consumer you'd get. One of my civil engineering buddies from England once explained to me that American homebuilding is probably the most wasteful, inefficient ways of erecting a structure concievable. If you think about it, it hasn't really changed much since at least the Victorian era (I'm sitting in a 1910 Victorian right now).
Two caveats. One: The Victorian illustrates just what you're talking about. A lot of Vic's are the same in overall design, but differing in little details such as a round turret vs a hexagonal, different columns, pediments, etc. That was good for them then, and it'll probably be good now. So what you'd need is a fairly large set of prototypes with different facades. Two (this is the big one): Different geographical areas have different requirements. For instance, wooden houses dominate California because there are earthquakes and the structure needs to flex a little. I'm no civil engineer, but can a machine work wood reliably enough for this context? All my factory-produced furniture is particle board.
I have a lot of gripes with the shuttle. If we ever seriously want to get into space, we need something less Industrial Revolution, something that's reusable and doesn't involve burning a metric assload of solid fuel and tend to cataclysmically explode.
However, those shuttles represent billions upon billions of dollars. Sure, all the blue-sky types at NASA want something more reliable, sustainable and smaller. However, in the current "budgetary climate," as they say, with Bush trying to start World War III with Islam and the economy still dusting itself off, your chances of getting Congress to authorize a new project are slightly less than zero. The shuttles are the only toys NASA has, and if they break, they're not going to get new ones.