Is Ken Burns the guy who did that Civil War documentary? If so, then yes, that was a pretty revolutionary effect. The problem was that if you have a voice over with no motion going on, people get restless and don't pay attention. (This being the MTV based concentration deprived generations) If you do various pans it subconsciously appears like action is going on. There were many other relatively revolutionary effects in that show. (Great documentary also)
If you do have a presentation and want to keep people's attention, it really does work.
As for *why* it works, I actually think that it probably comes from our primitive past when we noticed motion as a possible preditor ready to attack us or possible prey ready to feed us. Our eyes and brain are trained to focus more on change than stasis.
It would seem like this would be a very easy bug to fix and distribute with a software update. If they had a fix for a seldom used SSH feature why not this? (Which appears to affect a large number of people) I'd expect to see an update over the next few days.
The one thing I don't understand is when he says he is using Outlook over a VPN. Is he speaking of the old Outlook Express that comes with OSX as part of the Classic mode? I suppose it works, but it is rather dated and doesn't use Aqua. Entourage is better but has its own set of problems - including so-so XP Outlook compatibility. (i.e. full compatibility with the version of Outlook that comes with OfficeXP)
I'd also second that overall the article wasn't that informative. It also is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is true that many switchers switch because of problems with Windows that isn't really Window's fault. (i.e. comparing Window98 with OSX and ignoring XP) By the same measure you can find on many forums people who have a bad Mac experience which isn't typical of the platform. No problem except when they then judge the whole platform in terms of one bad behaving application, bad memory, or a bad motherboard. It often seems most comparisons are emotional ones based upon one bad experience. Fair comparisons are all too rare.
I should also add that, even as a OSX lover, there are crossplatform problems. I find the browser in OSX for browsing Windows shares rather weak. It misses many servers. Yes many of those problems are Microsoft's fault and not Apple's or Samba's. But they are there. Work arounds are needed. (And yes I know that some of those problems even appear in mixed Windows networks) Many programs, such as Illustrator, often have problem saving to Windows shares for reasons no one is quite sure of. Further compatibility between file formats isn't 100%. Exporting presentations from Keynote to Powerpoint doesn't always work, for instance, and often screws up PDFs and the like.
It is much better now than it was in the past. However there is also a lot more work to do. Hopefully better Outlook compatibility is coming (either from Microsoft or Apple). Most people expect Apple to come out with an Office killer this year as well. We'll see.
Admittedly a JIT compiler mixed with a port of Wine would be good. (Is most of Wine in C, or is it a mix of C and assembly?) However I'm *not* sure it is worth the effort. Further it wouldn't be a strict port simply because of the issues regarding byte ordering and so forth.
What you describe is basically what Apple did with the transition from the 68k to the PPC. However even now there is still a lot of emulated code.
Wha? Wine runs native under Unix. It isn't emulating anything. If you mean doing something like Wine where Apple rewrites Windows in PowerPC code you'd have a point. But that'd be hugely expensive and time consuming. Further what would Apple get? Merely the ability to run Windows programs slower than Windows. Why not pour those same resources into making applications that do what the Microsoft applications do, only better? (And with native Aqua interfaces)
There's nothing wrong with VPC. I use it occasionally myself. But I honestly can't see Apple wasting time writing an emulator. Further I doubt that Microsoft is going to kill VPC development. If anything we may get better VPC performance due to it all being under the same roof.
If Apple was going to do something, it'd probably go buy the old source code to SoftPC (a competitor to VPC from a few years ago) and then improve it. I can't see them using Bochs which really isn't targetted at the same market as VPC.
All they will do is emphasize the Microsoft name and not the Windows name. Alternatively they may re-emphasize.NET again and make the next iteration of Windows the Microsoft.NET Windows environment. They could then really push that technology over Linux.
I'd thought they were going to do that for a while. The past few months has brought about a decrease in the emphasis of the.NET terminology. (No doubt brought on in part by most people being confused about what the hell.NET was)
Igor really is an amazing program. Further it was written *for* the Mac. (There was a Windows port - but I believe it is primarily a Mac program) I'd heartedly recommend it. (Although I've not used the last version)
My problem with the review is that he doesn't explain his criticisms. For instance he says Safari is dysfunction and then never explains what he means by that. What didn't it do? With his passing Chimera comment he mentions that it locked up, but then I have IE on XP lock up about once a week also. Safari has yet to lock up for me.
The custom app problem I can understand, but it seems odd to criticize the platform for. Speed is a valid criticism, although to be fair he is using a very low end system. But overall I find that speed is the biggest thorn in the Mac's side. That should change with the 970 - especially if there are dual 2.5 GHz machines out.
Back when I was working with the ICF team it sure seemed to me like the "peaceful purposes" were designed to get Clinton to *increase* funding when most other science - especially weapons related science - was being cut. Sure enough. Most of Los Alamos got slashed to hell while those groups doing ICF got funding increases justified by power generation. (It also assimilated most of the tokomat folks)
As the saying goes, bureaucracies attempt to surive as if they were living things. . .
I always enjoyed those elite forces rappelling out of the helicopters in that "ninja" gear. They used to do that over by TA-55 which was the high secure area.
A friend of mine was hired to do a wildlife study in one of the areas. It wasn't even that secure an area. Every morning he set off the motion detectors. Every morning he was surrounded by 20 guys with machine guns and put down on the ground and searched. The fact that it was a repetitive task and they still kept it up tells you that the security is good. That's typically one of the way to break into a facility - have a recurring failure and then expect the team to get lazy.
As I mentioned elsewhere the security against outsiders is very good, unless things have changed dramatically the past 5 years. (Which, given Clinton and his choice of DOE leaders, wouldn't surprise me) The weakness is that they trust employees a little more than I think is justified. (IMO)
The place has well above federal safety standards of radiation even today. Just walking through is unlikely to cause a problem, though I definitely wouldn't want to live there.
Oh bullcrap. I wore a dosimeter there for the five years I worked there. I probably got more radiation when I flew back home than I did from the lab. (Other than the fact it is at a relatively high altitude and thus you get more radiation) People don't understand radiation and greatly exaggerate the risk. The problem with Los Alamos was that some of the things they did were overkill for safety while ignoring significant problems that weren't these "big issues."
I remember when the Tiger Team came back in the early 90's that people were being cited for using low quality screws on panelling that did nothing while a mandated "safe" rag disposal can was building up fumes. And radiation was treated amazingly silly. (Our bathroom was condemned because of some minor tritium contamination in the walls from 10 years earlier)
Don't get me wrong. From the 40's through the 70's there were some horrible environmental practices. Just up from our building there was a pit where they had driven some trucks filled with hazardous materials and then buried the whole thing. Nasty to clean up I'm sure. But the problem is that the pendulum swung so far the other way that the paperwork and red tape was overwhelming. If Los Alamos had a problem it wasn't too little safety but too much management.
He got into TA-33 which while labelled high security really isn't that big a deal. Now had he gotten into TA-55 with 3 layers of barbed wire, lots of guys with machine guns and other stuff *then* I'd be impressed. Hell, I'd have thought he'd have at least gotten into the secure part of the library. But no, all he did was wander into the forest near a National Park. Hell, even the unused forests up from there have motion detectors and security forces.
This is much ado about nothing.
Don't get me wrong. There is plenty to criticize about security at Los Alamos. But the article is akin to bragging that you got into the "johnny on the spot" outhouse in an used section under construction on the outskirts of a military base.
I will admit that they ought to be more secure about letting people *out* of facilities though. I used to work late and the guards left at 6 and there was only a unidirectional turnstile "guarding" the place. While there were other measures to retain building security, I could have walked out with lots of stuff had I wanted to. If I wanted to get in at night I'd just call the Pro Force and they'd let me into the building, no questions asked, so long as I had a security badge.
However lets also be honest. Most of the stuff labelled "top secret" really isn't terribly significant. The stuff that is important has a *lot* more security on it. For instance our really important servers and stuff were in sealed rooms and then inside rather large safes in those rooms. And only a few people had the passwords. We had all sorts of restrictions for cable length to avoid hacking via E&M signals. We had pretty amazing encryption devices. And the really important areas had amazing security. The weakest link, as always, tends to be the employees and not these sorts of things.
There are problems, but what this story discusses aren't they.
While it definitely is faster *not* to have wildcards, remember that you are simply iterating down through entries in your dictionary. So it isn't that big a time delay. The danger is that with a lot of terms you may accidentally end up searching for a thousand terms. With the index size they have that could cause a delay. But realize that the time delay we are speaking of is rather small relative to humans. (At least based upon what I know of Google's indexing technology)
The one thing you'd want to do is disallow wildcards at the beginning of a word. That would require going through *all* words in your index. But so long as you have the wildcards in the middle or end there really isn't that much of a problem. For effeciency I could see requiring at least 2-3 letters at the beginning of the word prior to allowing wildcards. But that's about it.
The problem with most searching is that 90% of people using them just want simple queries. Yet those who want more accurate searching will do more advanced searching (i.e. wildcards, proximity, and so forth) Yet those are admittedly more expensive and more complex. But I personally think tha the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for the power user. I truly wish that Google, for instance, had more advanced query technology.
Here's the issue. It seems to me that bluetooth's range isn't that great. Therefore if you can control your music with your phone it would be nearly as easy to just control it with your keyboard. I suppose there is that "geek chic" factor. But the nice thing about bluetooth to me is how easy it is to sync my devices - no cables everywhere. This, however, seems to be of limited usability.
Perhaps other people have better range than I do. But this seems like one of those solutions in search of a problem. That or else it is akin to the theming software or Konfabulator which is just to show off to geeks and nerds while people who use their computer to *do* things couldn't care less.
The problem is that if you want business people to use your computers then you need to get business departments in universities using it. Getting kids in even high school using your computer is rather pointless. They aren't really learning much beyond generics. At best you might inspired some hackers, but Apple intentionally never went after that market. That and the dominance of Linux in the CS and Engineering departments is what enabled Linux to get into the back office at a lot of businesses.
So Apple had the right idea. They just aimed it at the wrong audience. I'm not convinced that the lower education market is that useful. The margins are low and you are dealing with a market that doesn't count that much. At best you might get some kids to convince their parents to buy the trendy computer.
Now if Apple can get OSX into more departments in colleges, then I'd start to think they are accomplishing something. With effectively doing everything Linux can do and more, that is very doable. The problem is the hardware. So, as with everyone else, we're all crossing fingers for the 970.
Of course that assumes the 17 billion figure is accurate. Given previous science spending, I'd expect serious cost overruns to occur. Further it assumes no problems. What happens if there is a catastrophic failure halfway through construction? Unless you start taking those consideration into account the figure is meaningless.
As for the shuttle comparisons, realize that most of what the shuttle does can be done cheaper by other rockets anyway. The shuttle still flies so that we have the shuttle flying. (And the occasional Hubble fix - something that this vehicle would likely be relatively useless for)
I don't care if it is Cocoa. Indeed I'd probably prefer Carbon given how slow most initial Cocoa apps are. (i.e. the switch from Carbon to Cocoa with iMovie) What I *do* want is better multithreading of window activities in the Finder. Right now if one window in the Finder is doing something or waiting you can do NOTHING with the Finder until it is done. Oh that bugs me.
I did notice that drag and drop is much smoother though with the new update. I found with 10.2.3 that if I had a Finder window with lots of files and was dragging a file - even to the dock - when it passed over the Finder window things ground to a halt. Oh, the cursor continued to move smoothly, but the icon it was dragging was way back at the edge of the Finder window. I've not noticed it doing that with the update.
Still I suspect the main Finder updates won't be seen until 10.3.
I agree. While fuel cells for organic materials such as gasoline or alcohol are interesting, it's the hydrogen ones that everyone is focused in on. Contrary to what many think, such systems aren't completely clean. But they are a damn site better than anything we have now.
Fuel cells that work on organic "junk" are useful - but because of pollution concerns probably will need a lot of work. I have my doubts that they'd be efficient enough so as to be a practical energy source. But who knows. Perhaps eventually they'll become an effective way of recycling organic material. I don't expect such things as a practical technology for several decades though. In contrast hydrogen fuel cells will be mainstream in less than a decade.
Note that many people have noted that Keynote -> PowerPoint with embedded PDFs doesn't work too well. It tries and scale/compress the PDF in a way so that you loose most of your resolution and get a very fuzzy and blurry image. I wonder if this is a bit of a workaround (assuming such a project was written)
Oh - btw - for those with this problem. Make sure embedded graphics are saved as jpg or gif rather than pdf and the problem isn't that bad.
Most Mac's graphics cards can be upgraded. Which Macs are you talking about? I think the iMacs may not be able to. But all the Macs with PCI slots or the like support upgrades. Many people upgrade their graphics cards. Personally I don't do anything quite intensive enough to need such upgrades. Indeed I can't recall the last time I used a PCI slot for anything but an ethernet card. (On Macs or PCs)
New Scientist has a fascinating article on neural chips this week. Unfortunately it isn't available to non-subscribers or I'd post the link. (It is one of the main articles and not a news story)
It was going through the problem of how your immune system attacks most neural implants and methods for getting around this. You end up with "fuzzy" implants that don't look anything like science fiction stories typically portray them. They are still having problems with electrical signals because of the fuzziness. Still it was a very interesting article and suggested that these things will work different than we may have expected.
I actually don't mind the MDI in Project Builder. My main complaints with Project Builder are limited debugging features. For instance try having persistant watch variables between trips to the debugger. There is no "search" pane but instead you have a modal window.
Compare this to Visual Studio where you have tabbed persistent watch/expression panes. You have a nice toolbar with a search field that can search either the current document or all files in your document.
There really is no comparison between Visual Studio and Project Builder. I suppose a lot of this depends upon what kind of code you are using. Still I honestly wonder how people can stand tracking bugs down with Project Builder. I wanted to go full time with OSX for my development but ended up sticking with XP just because of this.
Codewarrior is better in some ways - its debugger is better for instance. But it still doesn't hold a candle to Visual Studio. It is also amazingly slow unless you can use precompiled headers extensively.
I'd made numerous suggestions to Apple and was excited when the last version of Project Builder came out. Sadly the actual debugging IDE had few changes. Perhaps some don't mind. Undoubtedly these folks don't mind printfs or using gdb. But it just isn't worth the hassle.
This is a rant slightly off topic though. So my apologies for conflating the MDI issue with Project Builder's other flaws. My original point was just that Project Builder does use MDI so the original person's point was demonstrably wrong. You are right though that Apple has made it so many aspects of the MDI are optional.
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If you do have a presentation and want to keep people's attention, it really does work.
As for *why* it works, I actually think that it probably comes from our primitive past when we noticed motion as a possible preditor ready to attack us or possible prey ready to feed us. Our eyes and brain are trained to focus more on change than stasis.
When did Apple acknowledge this bug?
I'd also second that overall the article wasn't that informative. It also is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is true that many switchers switch because of problems with Windows that isn't really Window's fault. (i.e. comparing Window98 with OSX and ignoring XP) By the same measure you can find on many forums people who have a bad Mac experience which isn't typical of the platform. No problem except when they then judge the whole platform in terms of one bad behaving application, bad memory, or a bad motherboard. It often seems most comparisons are emotional ones based upon one bad experience. Fair comparisons are all too rare.
I should also add that, even as a OSX lover, there are crossplatform problems. I find the browser in OSX for browsing Windows shares rather weak. It misses many servers. Yes many of those problems are Microsoft's fault and not Apple's or Samba's. But they are there. Work arounds are needed. (And yes I know that some of those problems even appear in mixed Windows networks) Many programs, such as Illustrator, often have problem saving to Windows shares for reasons no one is quite sure of. Further compatibility between file formats isn't 100%. Exporting presentations from Keynote to Powerpoint doesn't always work, for instance, and often screws up PDFs and the like.
It is much better now than it was in the past. However there is also a lot more work to do. Hopefully better Outlook compatibility is coming (either from Microsoft or Apple). Most people expect Apple to come out with an Office killer this year as well. We'll see.
What you describe is basically what Apple did with the transition from the 68k to the PPC. However even now there is still a lot of emulated code.
There's nothing wrong with VPC. I use it occasionally myself. But I honestly can't see Apple wasting time writing an emulator. Further I doubt that Microsoft is going to kill VPC development. If anything we may get better VPC performance due to it all being under the same roof.
If Apple was going to do something, it'd probably go buy the old source code to SoftPC (a competitor to VPC from a few years ago) and then improve it. I can't see them using Bochs which really isn't targetted at the same market as VPC.
I'd thought they were going to do that for a while. The past few months has brought about a decrease in the emphasis of the .NET terminology. (No doubt brought on in part by most people being confused about what the hell .NET was)
Igor really is an amazing program. Further it was written *for* the Mac. (There was a Windows port - but I believe it is primarily a Mac program) I'd heartedly recommend it. (Although I've not used the last version)
The custom app problem I can understand, but it seems odd to criticize the platform for. Speed is a valid criticism, although to be fair he is using a very low end system. But overall I find that speed is the biggest thorn in the Mac's side. That should change with the 970 - especially if there are dual 2.5 GHz machines out.
As the saying goes, bureaucracies attempt to surive as if they were living things. . .
Whoops. Slightly off link. Spork
I never called junk mail Spam. Since I was Canadian I always referred to it as Spork. What is Spork?
A friend of mine was hired to do a wildlife study in one of the areas. It wasn't even that secure an area. Every morning he set off the motion detectors. Every morning he was surrounded by 20 guys with machine guns and put down on the ground and searched. The fact that it was a repetitive task and they still kept it up tells you that the security is good. That's typically one of the way to break into a facility - have a recurring failure and then expect the team to get lazy.
As I mentioned elsewhere the security against outsiders is very good, unless things have changed dramatically the past 5 years. (Which, given Clinton and his choice of DOE leaders, wouldn't surprise me) The weakness is that they trust employees a little more than I think is justified. (IMO)
Oh bullcrap. I wore a dosimeter there for the five years I worked there. I probably got more radiation when I flew back home than I did from the lab. (Other than the fact it is at a relatively high altitude and thus you get more radiation) People don't understand radiation and greatly exaggerate the risk. The problem with Los Alamos was that some of the things they did were overkill for safety while ignoring significant problems that weren't these "big issues."
I remember when the Tiger Team came back in the early 90's that people were being cited for using low quality screws on panelling that did nothing while a mandated "safe" rag disposal can was building up fumes. And radiation was treated amazingly silly. (Our bathroom was condemned because of some minor tritium contamination in the walls from 10 years earlier)
Don't get me wrong. From the 40's through the 70's there were some horrible environmental practices. Just up from our building there was a pit where they had driven some trucks filled with hazardous materials and then buried the whole thing. Nasty to clean up I'm sure. But the problem is that the pendulum swung so far the other way that the paperwork and red tape was overwhelming. If Los Alamos had a problem it wasn't too little safety but too much management.
This is much ado about nothing.
Don't get me wrong. There is plenty to criticize about security at Los Alamos. But the article is akin to bragging that you got into the "johnny on the spot" outhouse in an used section under construction on the outskirts of a military base.
I will admit that they ought to be more secure about letting people *out* of facilities though. I used to work late and the guards left at 6 and there was only a unidirectional turnstile "guarding" the place. While there were other measures to retain building security, I could have walked out with lots of stuff had I wanted to. If I wanted to get in at night I'd just call the Pro Force and they'd let me into the building, no questions asked, so long as I had a security badge.
However lets also be honest. Most of the stuff labelled "top secret" really isn't terribly significant. The stuff that is important has a *lot* more security on it. For instance our really important servers and stuff were in sealed rooms and then inside rather large safes in those rooms. And only a few people had the passwords. We had all sorts of restrictions for cable length to avoid hacking via E&M signals. We had pretty amazing encryption devices. And the really important areas had amazing security. The weakest link, as always, tends to be the employees and not these sorts of things.
There are problems, but what this story discusses aren't they.
The one thing you'd want to do is disallow wildcards at the beginning of a word. That would require going through *all* words in your index. But so long as you have the wildcards in the middle or end there really isn't that much of a problem. For effeciency I could see requiring at least 2-3 letters at the beginning of the word prior to allowing wildcards. But that's about it.
The problem with most searching is that 90% of people using them just want simple queries. Yet those who want more accurate searching will do more advanced searching (i.e. wildcards, proximity, and so forth) Yet those are admittedly more expensive and more complex. But I personally think tha the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for the power user. I truly wish that Google, for instance, had more advanced query technology.
Perhaps other people have better range than I do. But this seems like one of those solutions in search of a problem. That or else it is akin to the theming software or Konfabulator which is just to show off to geeks and nerds while people who use their computer to *do* things couldn't care less.
Just one man's impression.
So Apple had the right idea. They just aimed it at the wrong audience. I'm not convinced that the lower education market is that useful. The margins are low and you are dealing with a market that doesn't count that much. At best you might get some kids to convince their parents to buy the trendy computer.
Now if Apple can get OSX into more departments in colleges, then I'd start to think they are accomplishing something. With effectively doing everything Linux can do and more, that is very doable. The problem is the hardware. So, as with everyone else, we're all crossing fingers for the 970.
As for the shuttle comparisons, realize that most of what the shuttle does can be done cheaper by other rockets anyway. The shuttle still flies so that we have the shuttle flying. (And the occasional Hubble fix - something that this vehicle would likely be relatively useless for)
(Just joking - I'm Canadian myself)
I did notice that drag and drop is much smoother though with the new update. I found with 10.2.3 that if I had a Finder window with lots of files and was dragging a file - even to the dock - when it passed over the Finder window things ground to a halt. Oh, the cursor continued to move smoothly, but the icon it was dragging was way back at the edge of the Finder window. I've not noticed it doing that with the update.
Still I suspect the main Finder updates won't be seen until 10.3.
Fuel cells that work on organic "junk" are useful - but because of pollution concerns probably will need a lot of work. I have my doubts that they'd be efficient enough so as to be a practical energy source. But who knows. Perhaps eventually they'll become an effective way of recycling organic material. I don't expect such things as a practical technology for several decades though. In contrast hydrogen fuel cells will be mainstream in less than a decade.
Oh - btw - for those with this problem. Make sure embedded graphics are saved as jpg or gif rather than pdf and the problem isn't that bad.
It was going through the problem of how your immune system attacks most neural implants and methods for getting around this. You end up with "fuzzy" implants that don't look anything like science fiction stories typically portray them. They are still having problems with electrical signals because of the fuzziness. Still it was a very interesting article and suggested that these things will work different than we may have expected.
Compare this to Visual Studio where you have tabbed persistent watch/expression panes. You have a nice toolbar with a search field that can search either the current document or all files in your document.
There really is no comparison between Visual Studio and Project Builder. I suppose a lot of this depends upon what kind of code you are using. Still I honestly wonder how people can stand tracking bugs down with Project Builder. I wanted to go full time with OSX for my development but ended up sticking with XP just because of this.
Codewarrior is better in some ways - its debugger is better for instance. But it still doesn't hold a candle to Visual Studio. It is also amazingly slow unless you can use precompiled headers extensively.
I'd made numerous suggestions to Apple and was excited when the last version of Project Builder came out. Sadly the actual debugging IDE had few changes. Perhaps some don't mind. Undoubtedly these folks don't mind printfs or using gdb. But it just isn't worth the hassle.
This is a rant slightly off topic though. So my apologies for conflating the MDI issue with Project Builder's other flaws. My original point was just that Project Builder does use MDI so the original person's point was demonstrably wrong. You are right though that Apple has made it so many aspects of the MDI are optional.