Our sys admin _IS_ hiking in Brazil for the last week, and the next two. But before he took off, he made sure to brief a group of us on the machines he takes care of, what they do, who can be contact for support on each machine in case it goes down, and how to get admin access on each machine if we really needed to.
If Lance Davis has a history of going off-list for extended periods, this is probably just an extreme case of that. If not - then something is seriously up...
If you're in an area served by Time Warner, give them a call, and ask about _ALL_ their plans. I was in the same boat you were - I was paying about $65 on my Time Warner bill (antenna service [$13] + 5 mbps broadband internet [$50]) and I wanted to get that total under $50 total. I called customer service and was told about a 768 kbps down / 128 kbps up service that cost just $25/month. I sit on 100 base-T at work, so for home, I thought that was more than adequate. So I signed up for it, and have been happy ever since. I purchase the occasional song from iTunes or Amazon, so this speed is more than adequate for my needs. If I ever have to get a CD or DVD iso, I just let it run overnight.
I realized just recently, I was upgraded to 2 mb down / 384 up connection with no change in price. I don't know if you have Time Warner or not, or who your provider is. But make it sound like you're a looking for a reason to stay with them, etc...
I was telling someone that the 2 things I wish the Touch had were a PDF reader and an SSH client. Hopefully, the dev. environment will allow these and many, many other goodies. If that _IS_ the case, the Touch very well become my new home computer...
Check out Mercury systems. These aren't exactly for home use, but they are shipping Cell + Linux computer systems. However, given the economics, it might just be better to go with a PS3, if you can live with the memory limitations. There may be other companies, but checking at TerraSoft (one vendor for PowerPC Linux software and hardware) takes you right back to IBM and Mercury hardware.
I'm a wanna-be triathlete. Done several runs over the last couple years, have been getting more into biking, and just started swimming again. My own caloric intake has probably increased by about 50% (at the very least) since I've started training. The very cool thing is that despite that increase, I've actually lost body fat, so I have a bit more tone and definition now than I ever did as a teenager or tweenager;-)
So this guy is wrong, at least on this count. But the athlete's diet also has many of the components like any other good-sense diet out there - lots of fruits and vegetables for your nutrients, and lots of complex carbs (as this is what gets stored in your muscles and liver, and fuels you for the long haul at the intensities the higher-tier athletes perform at), proteins and a smattering of fats. As an athlete, you just take in larger quantities (though not substantially larger) of these things than a more sedentary individual.
I'm just wondering in how many different ways we can hear the message before people really start hearing it... Frustrating as all hell...
that with 2 earlier articles - making DVD copying even more illegal (if that were at all possible), and a "desire" for a Canadian DMCA, that we "now just find out" people are willing to pay for DRM-free content. I did my part and paid for a couple of tracks that I bought with DRM and "upgraded" to the DRM-free version, and will continue to do so as more become available, and as content I want becomes available DRM-free. Let's really show them where we willing to spend our $. Seems to be the only thing they listen to...
I've wondered and bounced the idea off a couple of other people that would water-marking be a better solution than DRM ? With the watermark and no DRM, you can do as you please with your music/movie/media, and if it gets out onto the file-sharing networks - you'll be responsible...
I know it's not a perfect solution - but I personally would not mind such a scheme, if it lets me do what I want (personally) with digital files I purchase and record.
What I'd love to see, if it isn't already in the bill (and I didn't see confirmation of anything like that in the bill from the article) was to have companies and institutions that lose consumer data pay for something like 1-3 years of credit monitoring....
Personal data is too cheap and easy to collect and warehouse these days, and hence, easy to steal in huge chunks. If companies and institutions want to use and profit from our personal data, we should not have to suffer for it if they can't take care of it. I would say an "incentive" like this makes personal data hoarding MUCH more expensive and risky, will make companies think twice about their data hoarding, and shifts the balance somewhat back to the consumers.
Seriously - considering MS's past record with ex "partners" - I can't see why anyone else would want to "partner" with them.... Unless Novell wants to go the way of Corel very soon...
The problem on the Mac (esp. if it is one of the newer Intel-based macs) is that Office is probably running under Rosetta translation, which probably entails a heavy performance hit, esp. if it involves graphics, etc. (tasks that would have typically used Altivec). I saw a colleague give a presentation with PowerPoint on a MacBook Pro, and it invariably struggled when any kind of graphic came up. Hopefully, MS will have Universal Binaries soon, and Keynote probably already is, even though I don't remember that being announced.
The consumer line of laptops have had several differentiating features from the pro line. And I think in addition to the lack of gigabit ethernet, lack of expansion slot and included wireless, the CPU was the other big differentiator. I find it hard to believe they will put in a dual core CPU into the new "iBooks" - I would guess a new single-core pentium-M CPU...
I just hope they keep the dedicated video, and stay away from the integrated Intel video.
Could you imagine the pandemonium if this announcement had been made last Sat, Apr 1 - their 30th Anniversay ?? It would have gone from, "WTF - good one, you had us going for a while there.." to "You mean the page isn't hacked ?" to "OMG - Ponies !!!";-) Oh, I would have loved for the timing of this to be just a little bit different from how they actually did it:)
Actually, iTunes does support plug-ins, and not just for media. I think it will use Quicktime extensions to play different media formats, so if someone ported, say the Ogg Vorbis plugin for quicktime, you should be able to use it to play Ogg songs in iTunes. Plus - the older versions of Whitecap (a combo spectrum analyser and screen saver) also work within iTunes, and provide a MUCH nicer visualizer (IMHO) to Apple's default.
I'll call you on that one - the new iMacs, and even G5s had performance benchmarks that mattered very much for our research group. If you take a look at the page http://www.neuro.mcw.edu/afni_speedo.html , you will see benchmark results for several different types of machines, all running the same analysis on the same set of data. The new iMacs are barely slower than an Athlon 4000 when using a single thread, and even surpasses the old G5s and everything else when using 2 threads. This benchmark tests FP and memory access performance, and let's just say that with the current performance results, people ARE looking into getting more of these newer Macs.
And also keep in mind, when you go to 64-bit and Opteron/Pentium D class machines (as with the old G5s), you're moving up into another machine and price class. For 64-bit and the performance, these machines were VERY much worth it - both the old G5s (performance and larger memory space) and seemingly, the new iMacs (performance).
It looks like the new Macs will be all that we hoped. According to this page,they use EFI for their bootloader. So once the rest of the hardware is supported, linux support should not be an issue, and neither should windows (though I have no idea about Windows support for EFI).
> I still don't even know how to skip over words in a line of text (in Linux/windows it's ctrl+arrow, but this does > nothing in most mac apps).
To skip over works, try option/alt (depending on your keyboard) + left/right arrow. To go to the very start or end of a line, use command/apple/cloverleaf + left/right arrow. Pretty much everything I've tried (eg TextEdit.app and Camino.app) obey this.
So on a mac, with both Camino and Safari (with the debug option on) having a browser reset, that clears EVERYTHING (cookies, cache, history, etc.) - what does that make non-IE mac users ?
My research work (and my doctoral dissertation) involved developing technology to enable exactly these studies. The basic mechanism which these studies use was published back in 1992 by three groups almost simultaneously (Harvard-MGH, U. of Minnesota and the Medical College of WI).
After almost 15 years, the workings of the brain that causes this phenomenon is still not completely understood. What happens when a region of the brain starts working towards a particular mental task, be it visual, auditory, memory, etc., is that blood supply to that part of the brain increases to such an extent that there is an oversupply of oxygen (via hemoglobin). The differing levels of oxy- and deoxy- hemoglobin have different enough magnetic properties that the change in relative amounts can be detected by a suitably equipped MRI scanner.
I've been telling this joke at parties for years when people ask me what I do - much better than saying I'm an engineer developing MRI hardware and software.
Bottom line - we've been able to do this for years. But the workings of the living brain are incredibly complex, and it'll be a little while before we get to the bottom of things. That piece on lie detectors using brain scans that came out a few months ago was based on this same technology/research. But we really don't know anywhere near enough for me to think that research was anything close to valid.
Anyone remember those - they were pretty neat for their time (~ 5 years ago, IIRC). Either 640x480 or 800x600. Pretty pricey, but one would have hoped that with the rest of advances in tech, packaging would have become more sleek, features improved, and prices would have come down...
I made the comment a while back that these things would probably be a boon for laptop battery life...
Just a small correction - it is NOT AAC that needs to be licensed. AAC is some kind of wrapper/variant on MPEG-4 audio. The iPod will play multiple formats (heck, even my Symbian Nokia phone plays AAC files). It's their DRM (Fairplay) that they're not sharing. Heck - they even bought out the company that originally came up with it. So now they own the whole thing - lock, stock and 2 smoking barrels...
So we're talking about an 80 million dollar miscalculation, out of 9.7 billion dollars (just over 0.8%). I know these are big numbers, but in the grand scheme of statistics, is this more than just a statistical anomoly? Or are the accounts not even supposed to be that little bit wrong ?
I would love to see MS taken down a notch or two, but I have a hard time believing this is more than just wishful thinking on the part of some parties. If we see more than a 1% reduction in successive quarters, then I'll agree we're onto something. But till that time, I'll just keep hoping...;-)
I don't think the limit is on the video memory - I think what Core Image needs to be hardware accelerated by the GPU is a card with programmable hardware shaders (which most likely coincides with the video RAM level you mentioned). I believe this is on par with "DirectX 9 compatible" cards on XP.
The other thing to note is that even if hardware acceleration isn't possible, Apple has optimized their low-level system libraries to provide a suitable (though not as high-performance) substitute. I have the last non-white/non-silver powerbook, and upgraded it to a G4 550, from a G3 500. The speed increase in things that were purely floating point were about 10%, as you'd expect from the bump in CPU speed. But for things that used Altivec (ripping in iTunes and some image processing stuf), the speed increase was anywhere from 25-33%.
I'm curious to see how Tiger will run on this machine. I suspect that it will probably be the last release that officially supports this machine, but heck, it's 5 years old already, and by the time the next release rolls out, I SHOULD get a new PB;-)
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Our sys admin _IS_ hiking in Brazil for the last week, and the next two. But before he took off, he made sure to brief a group of us on the machines he takes care of, what they do, who can be contact for support on each machine in case it goes down, and how to get admin access on each machine if we really needed to.
If Lance Davis has a history of going off-list for extended periods, this is probably just an extreme case of that. If not - then something is seriously up ...
If you're in an area served by Time Warner, give them a call, and ask about _ALL_ their plans. I was in the same boat you were - I was paying about $65 on my Time Warner bill (antenna service [$13] + 5 mbps broadband internet [$50]) and I wanted to get that total under $50 total. I called customer service and was told about a 768 kbps down / 128 kbps up service that cost just $25/month. I sit on 100 base-T at work, so for home, I thought that was more than adequate. So I signed up for it, and have been happy ever since. I purchase the occasional song from iTunes or Amazon, so this speed is more than adequate for my needs. If I ever have to get a CD or DVD iso, I just let it run overnight.
I realized just recently, I was upgraded to 2 mb down / 384 up connection with no change in price. I don't know if you have Time Warner or not, or who your provider is. But make it sound like you're a looking for a reason to stay with them, etc ...
I was telling someone that the 2 things I wish the Touch had were a PDF reader and an SSH client. Hopefully, the dev. environment will allow these and many, many other goodies. If that _IS_ the case, the Touch very well become my new home computer ...
Check out Mercury systems. These aren't exactly for home use, but they are shipping Cell + Linux computer systems. However, given the economics, it might just be better to go with a PS3, if you can live with the memory limitations. There may be other companies, but checking at TerraSoft (one vendor for PowerPC Linux software and hardware) takes you right back to IBM and Mercury hardware.
I'm a wanna-be triathlete. Done several runs over the last couple years, have been getting more into biking, and just started swimming again. My own caloric intake has probably increased by about 50% (at the very least) since I've started training. The very cool thing is that despite that increase, I've actually lost body fat, so I have a bit more tone and definition now than I ever did as a teenager or tweenager ;-)
... Frustrating as all hell ...
So this guy is wrong, at least on this count. But the athlete's diet also has many of the components like any other good-sense diet out there - lots of fruits and vegetables for your nutrients, and lots of complex carbs (as this is what gets stored in your muscles and liver, and fuels you for the long haul at the intensities the higher-tier athletes perform at), proteins and a smattering of fats. As an athlete, you just take in larger quantities (though not substantially larger) of these things than a more sedentary individual.
I'm just wondering in how many different ways we can hear the message before people really start hearing it
that with 2 earlier articles - making DVD copying even more illegal (if that were at all possible), and a "desire" for a Canadian DMCA, that we "now just find out" people are willing to pay for DRM-free content. I did my part and paid for a couple of tracks that I bought with DRM and "upgraded" to the DRM-free version, and will continue to do so as more become available, and as content I want becomes available DRM-free. Let's really show them where we willing to spend our $. Seems to be the only thing they listen to ...
I've wondered and bounced the idea off a couple of other people that would water-marking be a better solution than DRM ? With the watermark and no DRM, you can do as you please with your music/movie/media, and if it gets out onto the file-sharing networks - you'll be responsible ...
I know it's not a perfect solution - but I personally would not mind such a scheme, if it lets me do what I want (personally) with digital files I purchase and record.
What I'd love to see, if it isn't already in the bill (and I didn't see confirmation of anything like that in the bill from the article) was to have companies and institutions that lose consumer data pay for something like 1-3 years of credit monitoring ....
Personal data is too cheap and easy to collect and warehouse these days, and hence, easy to steal in huge chunks. If companies and institutions want to use and profit from our personal data, we should not have to suffer for it if they can't take care of it. I would say an "incentive" like this makes personal data hoarding MUCH more expensive and risky, will make companies think twice about their data hoarding, and shifts the balance somewhat back to the consumers.
Thoughts anyone ?
Be afwaid ... be vewy afwaid ...
.... Unless Novell wants to go the way of Corel very soon ...
Seriously - considering MS's past record with ex "partners" - I can't see why anyone else would want to "partner" with them
The problem on the Mac (esp. if it is one of the newer Intel-based macs) is that Office is probably running under Rosetta translation, which probably entails a heavy performance hit, esp. if it involves graphics, etc. (tasks that would have typically used Altivec). I saw a colleague give a presentation with PowerPoint on a MacBook Pro, and it invariably struggled when any kind of graphic came up. Hopefully, MS will have Universal Binaries soon, and Keynote probably already is, even though I don't remember that being announced.
The consumer line of laptops have had several differentiating features from the pro line. And I think in addition to the lack of gigabit ethernet, lack of expansion slot and included wireless, the CPU was the other big differentiator. I find it hard to believe they will put in a dual core CPU into the new "iBooks" - I would guess a new single-core pentium-M CPU ...
I just hope they keep the dedicated video, and stay away from the integrated Intel video.
Could you imagine the pandemonium if this announcement had been made last Sat, Apr 1 - their 30th Anniversay ?? It would have gone from, "WTF - good one, you had us going for a while there .." to "You mean the page isn't hacked ?" to "OMG - Ponies !!!" ;-) Oh, I would have loved for the timing of this to be just a little bit different from how they actually did it :)
Actually, iTunes does support plug-ins, and not just for media. I think it will use Quicktime extensions to play different media formats, so if someone ported, say the Ogg Vorbis plugin for quicktime, you should be able to use it to play Ogg songs in iTunes. Plus - the older versions of Whitecap (a combo spectrum analyser and screen saver) also work within iTunes, and provide a MUCH nicer visualizer (IMHO) to Apple's default.
I'll call you on that one - the new iMacs, and even G5s had performance benchmarks that mattered very much for our research group. If you take a look at the page http://www.neuro.mcw.edu/afni_speedo.html , you will see benchmark results for several different types of machines, all running the same analysis on the same set of data. The new iMacs are barely slower than an Athlon 4000 when using a single thread, and even surpasses the old G5s and everything else when using 2 threads. This benchmark tests FP and memory access performance, and let's just say that with the current performance results, people ARE looking into getting more of these newer Macs.
And also keep in mind, when you go to 64-bit and Opteron/Pentium D class machines (as with the old G5s), you're moving up into another machine and price class. For 64-bit and the performance, these machines were VERY much worth it - both the old G5s (performance and larger memory space) and seemingly, the new iMacs (performance).
It looks like the new Macs will be all that we hoped. According to this page,they use EFI for their bootloader. So once the rest of the hardware is supported, linux support should not be an issue, and neither should windows (though I have no idea about Windows support for EFI).
Vive la Apple ;-)
> I still don't even know how to skip over words in a line of text (in Linux/windows it's ctrl+arrow, but this does
> nothing in most mac apps).
To skip over works, try option/alt (depending on your keyboard) + left/right arrow. To go to the very start or end
of a line, use command/apple/cloverleaf + left/right arrow. Pretty much everything I've tried (eg TextEdit.app and
Camino.app) obey this.
cheers
So on a mac, with both Camino and Safari (with the debug option on) having a browser reset, that clears EVERYTHING (cookies, cache, history, etc.) - what does that make non-IE mac users ?
My research work (and my doctoral dissertation) involved developing technology to enable exactly these studies. The basic mechanism which these studies use was published back in 1992 by three groups almost simultaneously (Harvard-MGH, U. of Minnesota and the Medical College of WI).
After almost 15 years, the workings of the brain that causes this phenomenon is still not completely understood. What happens when a region of the brain starts working towards a particular mental task, be it visual, auditory, memory, etc., is that blood supply to that part of the brain increases to such an extent that there is an oversupply of oxygen (via hemoglobin). The differing levels of oxy- and deoxy- hemoglobin have different enough magnetic properties that the change in relative amounts can be detected by a suitably equipped MRI scanner.
I've been telling this joke at parties for years when people ask me what I do - much better than saying I'm an engineer developing MRI hardware and software.
Bottom line - we've been able to do this for years. But the workings of the living brain are incredibly complex, and it'll be a little while before we get to the bottom of things. That piece on lie detectors using brain scans that came out a few months ago was based on this same technology/research. But we really don't know anywhere near enough for me to think that research was anything close to valid.
Anyone remember those - they were pretty neat for their time (~ 5 years ago, IIRC). Either 640x480 or 800x600. Pretty pricey, but one would have hoped that with the rest of advances in tech, packaging would have become more sleek, features improved, and prices would have come down ...
...
I made the comment a while back that these things would probably be a boon for laptop battery life
Just a handful of comments, and the links are already not responding. Can anyone seed a torrent and provide that ?
cheers
But in addition to these platforms, debian supports almost that many more. SPARC, m68k, ARM, MIPs, etc. See http://www.debian.org/ports/
:)
RedHat may support the more popular CPU platforms, but Debian tries to give equal weight to pretty much anything with a CPU and MMU
Just a small correction - it is NOT AAC that needs to be licensed. AAC is some kind of wrapper/variant on MPEG-4 audio. The iPod will play multiple formats (heck, even my Symbian Nokia phone plays AAC files). It's their DRM (Fairplay) that they're not sharing. Heck - they even bought out the company that originally came up with it. So now they own the whole thing - lock, stock and 2 smoking barrels
That's how I feel after donating to the EEF last year and this happening now. Looks like I'll be sending them another cheque this year
Good work folks! Now, let's make sure this never sees the light of day in any of the law-making branches of the legislature!
So we're talking about an 80 million dollar miscalculation, out of 9.7 billion dollars (just over 0.8%). I know these are big numbers, but in the grand scheme of statistics, is this more than just a statistical anomoly? Or are the accounts not even supposed to be that little bit wrong ?
I would love to see MS taken down a notch or two, but I have a hard time believing this is more than just wishful thinking on the part of some parties. If we see more than a 1% reduction in successive quarters, then I'll agree we're onto something. But till that time, I'll just keep hoping
I don't think the limit is on the video memory - I think what Core Image needs to be hardware accelerated by the GPU is a card with programmable hardware shaders (which most likely coincides with the video RAM level you mentioned). I believe this is on par with "DirectX 9 compatible" cards on XP.
;-)
The other thing to note is that even if hardware acceleration isn't possible, Apple has optimized their low-level system libraries to provide a suitable (though not as high-performance) substitute. I have the last non-white/non-silver powerbook, and upgraded it to a G4 550, from a G3 500. The speed increase in things that were purely floating point were about 10%, as you'd expect from the bump in CPU speed. But for things that used Altivec (ripping in iTunes and some image processing stuf), the speed increase was anywhere from 25-33%.
I'm curious to see how Tiger will run on this machine. I suspect that it will probably be the last release that officially supports this machine, but heck, it's 5 years old already, and by the time the next release rolls out, I SHOULD get a new PB