Re:Many bugs were fixed, and CSS improved *a lot*
on
Safari Beta Updated
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· Score: 2, Informative
It also fixes that annoying bug with pulldown buttons for bookmarks. It the prior versions you could sometimes click on one button and have the button beside it come down.
Sadly there still is spotty support for context menus, especially in the bookmark panes.
[i][b]Apple typically does NOT like Multiple Document Interfaces[/b][/i]
Although it has something unnervingly like the MDI with Project Builder. Project Builder has all sorts of odd interface features, such as close buttons that are "flat" representing a MDI document. It also misses many important UI features for a compiler/debugger, although that's a different issue. Anyway my point is that "panes" in Project Builder are an obvious exception to this.
I do wish Apple would improve Project Builder. Why the most essential application for the system - its development environment - is as weak as it is remains a mystery to me.
Quantum physics says that something can indeed be created out nothing
Well, getting more philosophical than physicists like, technically there isn't nothing. There is space and there are the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics still rests on a fairly Newtonian view of space/time. That's one of the many reasons it is such a bear to unify with General Relativity which has a conception of space much more in tune with Leibniz' view of space.
Also the "big bang" is extrapolating back well beyond Planck time to where/when we really don't have physics to describe. So we can say that a classical view of the history of the universe (i.e. arrived at with relativity) suggests a big bang. We could say it was something from nothing, as the true big bang doesn't even have space. (Thus invalidating what I said about Newtonian space) However we really don't know what is going on that early and even if there was a big bang of the sort we think of.
This is one of those places where our cosmological speculation outstrips our physical laws. If we adopt the inflationary bubble universes, then perhaps our "big bang" really arose from a sufficiently flat space/time the vacuum fluctuations created our universe. Who knows? While it is fun to speculate, I think a lot of discussion of the "origin of the universe" ought to be presented clearly as speculation. It is moving a little too far beyond established theory for my tastes.
What is funny is that "dark energy" is also termed "quintessence" or the fifth element. Quintessence was an other term for aether which, as you might recall, was the nebulous stuff in the cosmos prior to modern physics. Funny how things we thought we disproved pop back unexpectedly.
Of course aether was primarily brought up by Maxwell to explain certain phenomena. It was disproved by the "fact" that the speed of light was a constant in all inertial frames.
What's interesting is that there is a movement to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, the speed of light wasn't a constant after all. While I rather doubt that, New Scientist has an interesting interview with the main proponent of that theory, Joao Magueijo. Interview with Joao Magueijo
I rather doubt Einstein is wrong on this matter, although some of Magueijo's criticisms of superstring theory are often made. Still quite a few people are discussing the issue. Landau, for instance, has a recent paper on the topic. "Charge Conservation and Time-Varying Speed of Light.
With the older version of Fink compiling against the X11 sources improved things considerably. I'd expect that if you've updated Fink since X11.app came out this isn't necessary. In my case I made the mistake of upgrading Perl outside of Fink and that screwed many things up since Fink's expected version of Perl was different than mine. I ended up having to recompile most of my stuff from scratch. It wasn't too bad. I just let it run all night. (grin)
KDE works great with this version. I'd suggest compiling 3.1 from cvs though. With this version I find KDE is actually faster than Aqua windows. Great. With X11.b1 I had lots of random crashes and the problem of windows/menus under the OSX menu. X11.b2 fixes all this. As an added bonus OSX fonts now show up in KDE applications. Very nice.
The problem I'm left with is that clicking on a KDE window doesn't bring it to the front over an Aqua window for some reason. Oddly this doesn't affect non-KDE windows, such as Gnome apps like Gnumeric. I can't quite figure that out.
My remaining problem is that I can't seem to copy and paste between X11 apps and OSX apps. I'm not sure why. A few people are left with some phantom processes, even after quitting X11. So that may be what is keeping copy and paste from working right. I'd started it using the kde window manager instead of the aqua-wm manager. So perhaps something was left running that was screwing aqua-wm up.
Still overall it feels faster and from my preliminary testing is much more stable.
Funny. A few friends of mine dropped some bowling balls off a rather tall building on campus when it was discovered that the doors to the roof were left unlocked. It bounced rather high several times. (They did have someone below checking to make sure no pedestrians were around).
An other friend bought some bowling balls at a thrift store back in High School. They rolled it down the street to hit a curb where it would fly high up in the air - much to their amusement. They did this about 6 times until it smashed through the curb, flew off into the air and went through someones roof. Fortunately no one was home. But it taught them why dropping things isn't always a good idea.
I've been hiking in the backcountry where some stupid mfer was rolling boulders down a mountain thinking no one was around. Unless you know exactly where you are dropping things and have scoped things out, dropping things from a plane isn't too smart. (IMO)
BTW - there was an old B-movie staring Charlie Sheen where they do a cool stunt. Someone is locked in the trunk of a car and dropped out of a cargo plane. The stunt man dives after it, gets the keys out of the ignition, slides to the back, unlocks the trunk, gets the person out, clips them into their chute and then they tangent open together. Horrible movie but very cool stunt. Too bad today it would be handled via CGI. It seems like real stunts are becoming a thing of the past.
Didn't traditional Buddhism (as opposed to modern interpretations) tend to see the universe as already infinite? This would be quite different - especially if it postulated a real infinity. For one it would never run out of "souls."
I also seem to recall some problems moving from Buddhist discussions of nirvana into a more western styled metaphysics of "energy." But that's probably neither here nor there. Is the "everyone on every plane is enlightened" technically part of Buddhism as an end state?
Or if you like some of the other Inflationary theories, you could have a sufficiently flat spacetime and simple create a new universe. Of course that assumes that "movement" between universes is possible. I don't think there is anything that indicates it is. (Although the old joke in physics about "that which is not forbidden is compulsory" may apply)
It doesn't find most servers on my network when you click "Connect to Server." It sees other Samba servers fine. But it misses most of the XP machines. It also doesn't provide a straightfoward way of seeing printers.
Strangely it is inconsistent. Some Win2K servers appear while other ones don't - even on the same Workgroup. I don't know why this is. I just know that right now the browsing function in the Finder doesn't work right.
Some others have noted that there are theories where energy and/or matter are spontaneously created in empty space. These can coexist with the heat death fate if the new energy is also evenly spread
Are you talking about how there is no global energy conservation due to time assymetry and Noether's theorem?
I find this an interesting fate because it's also reflected in some religions and philosophies, where everything becomes one at the end of time.
Don't most religions postulating "one" at the end of time actually have something closer to the big-bang / big-crunch? I mean the final conflagration in Heraclitus on up through the Stoics seems to have much more in common with the earlier view of cosmology. The big cruch returns everything to fire = logos that was had at the beginning of the universe. In this view the fire is raw energy and information.
I don't know of anything in traditional philosophies or religions that really corresponds to the heat death of the universe.
What happens when I check out a project from cvs that has a directory named 'cvs' in it? That's right, it sucks. The same goes for tarballs with a README and a readme, or configure and CONFIGURE, etc.
How do these people deal with Windows interoperability? This is actually a problem I've dealt with moving code from Windows to Linux. Case often got screwed up leading to some pains setting up Makefiles and so forth.
The general solution is a little Python program that just renames all files to lowercase. Works great. However, if there were some idiot programming in Linux who demanded not only mixed case, but made it break when anyone with any other OS used it. . . Well such a person wouldn't be working with me for long if they kept it up.
I think case sensitivity is often very helpful. However in general in English we don't distinguish based upon case. So a strong, compelling argument can be made against case sensitivity in file names.
Also, I should add that beyond the afore mentioned copying problems, I've yet to find a case where two files with the same name but different case exist in the same directory.
I love OSX and think it a vastly superior desktop OS to either XP or Linux with KDE or Gnome. However, having said that, there clearly are things OSX doesn't yet do easily. Try browsing a Windows network. Yes you can connect, but (to quote an earlier post) you have to write down the address. There isn't anything equivalent to clicking on Network Neighborhood or Computers Near Me and seeing everything. You have to know IP addresses and so forth for printers. Further the printer drivers for OSX are often inferior to XP versions.
There are solutions to this, of course. For instance if you are printing to printers on a PC network, I'd advise getting GimpPrint. It takes a lot of Linux printer drivers for GIMP, adds some nice UI, and makes them general OSX drivers. (The underlying CUPS printing system is very nice - its just that printer dirvers often are woefully underpowered in their native OSX forms)
The other solution to accessing a Windows network with a Mac is the "write it down solution." Hardly ideal, although to be fair, something Linux users also typically end up doing. There are some freeware/shareware solutions that provide browsers. Not all of them work equally though. (i.e. they don't really solve the underlying issues) The following is one that many people like. (I personally only have a few shares and thus only need to set them up once, after which "who cares?"
My point isn't that this is a huge problem. (It isn't) But it is something that is vastly easier in XP than in OSX. Further many "less tech savvy" individuals will have problem hooking their Mac to their PC network. Hopefully Apple will resolve this in 10.3. (Certainly they need to seriously revamp the Finder due to its lack of multithreading and poor FTP support along with the SMB problems)
I didn't know serious rocketry used this. Cool. I remember back in the days when toys could be fun and dangerous my making a small rocket in this way. Probably different than what these guys did. It was one of the "experiments" in my chemistry set I got for Christmas in the early 70's. Probably I was too young for such a thing, but boy did I love it. What are the chances of a Christmas present *these* days that comes with Sulfuric Acid, Hydrochloric acid and so forth and has instructions on making various explosives!
My favorite experiment was the sulfuric acid mixed with sugar. I thought it was so cool that I quickly used up all the acid and made my Dad go out and find a big bottle of it.
With all the regulations for liability now along with terrorist worries, it is probably impossible to even get half that stuff. No more ice cream made from liquid nitrogen now that I'm out of college.
I believe that it will be available for significant testing within a couple of months. According to some people in the plant there are numerous PowerMac cases there, suggesting that significant testing is going on right now. That says nothing about it coming out in volume, of course. It does sound of late if the August-September date may be a tad optimistic. However I doubt it will ship much later than the Athalon-64. It may even beat AMD.
No one knows, of course. Anyone who claims to know much beyond the "second half 2003" statement is likely talking out their ass.
While there is a lot of truth in what you say, it is also the case that the "killer app" of the next couple of years will be desktop video. I don't just mean playing movie trailers, but rather an integrated home audio-video system. Already Apple is pushing this with their iLife package and Microsoft is doing the same. However even top end Pentium4 systems are not fast enough to do this in a convinient fashion. Doing video editing with effects taking place in realtime requires a *lot* of power.
Yes not everyone is plugging their CamcorderDV into their computers at the moment. But a lot are. Further look at where the main folks are pushing PCs. They want to replace your home stereo/AV system with a PC. We have Microsoft's recent releases in this, we have all those PVR systems, and we have Apple's digital hub. Use any of those systems though and you'll see that they aren't ready for prime time simply because of speed.
Is this relevant to the Itanium? Not really. That is targeted at servers which is a different market. Of course IBM is targeting the 970 as a Linux server, yet Apple is by most accounts planning on releasing workstations with it come September. (And most folks using Photoshop or Final Cut Pro are saying that it is long overdue)
Yes for those who simply do a little web browsing and word processing, computers made 3 years ago are more than good enough. Yet at the same time those aren't the lucrative market for manufacturers either. And somehow those people *do* try and play some of the new AV feeds off the net or complain about doing mild AV stuff. Once we have an integrated home entertainment environment then those people *won't* just be doing simple web browsing or word processing either.
Servers are a different beast since the processing requirements are simply different from workstations or home systems. I don't want to downplay that. However lets be honest. With most servers running even on machines from a few years ago it is bandwidth that is often the limit and not processing speed. Yeah I know of applications for which that isn't true. And there are other niche markets. But think of most of the servers you encounter. Not the ones that get the "press" or the notice, but the ones that get used the most. How many of them have their needs met by a 1 GHz Pentium4 system running Linux? I daresay most. Does it matter? No. Because those other servers that *do* require the speed still are critical.
That's why the 970, the Itanium, and the Opteron all matter. Its like saying SUVs don't matter since most people never go off road or drive in rough snow. Yet for those who do need those things the truck or SUV is critical. The fact most drive something that is overkill is beside the point.
Re:Painful? Yes. Helps long term? I don't see it.
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
It actually is helpful for two reasons. One it stimulates third world economies - or at least nations who aren't as "powerful." Secondly it stimulates innovation in the first world. After all if the first world can't compete over wages and sometimes hard work then it has to compete by figuring unique ways of being more productive. How they do that varies.
In the computer industry the best way to innovate is to become a consultant and offer something those other outsources don't. Or better yet simply start your own business.
If what you want is a nice stable job without any effort on your part, then yes, free trade sucks. Of course along with others I see that as a very selfish position. "Screw the third world - let them live in poverty. I just want a nice high paying job that I don't have to do much for."
That's why I said I find the anti-globalism a very schitzophrenic movement. On the one hand it claims to want to help these other nations. Yet at the same time it wants to keep from those nations the opporunity to choose the same things the first world has.
Reminds me of all those patronizing climbing articles written about Nepal back in the '90s. They felt they were loosing their culture because they weren't being kept in the 19th century. Now there clearly are problems with cultural contamination. But the attitude towards all these nations seems to take a very paternalistic and self serving view. We know what's best for you. You ought to stay where you are. The problem is contact with us.
Rather than deal with the underlying issues of whether particular contact is desired or not, contact as a whole is labled good or bad. And it is done so either by a narrow view of what is good for my town or on the view that everything western is somehow bad.
While there are many problems in globalism, the fact is that thinking globally is the most humanistic and charitable thing to do. The fact is that those programmers in India are not somehow less deserving than the programmers in your town or even the next town over.
Not only is fear of outsourcing naive, but it is rather selfish. I never quite understood how most antiglobalism movements simultaneously felt the west wasn't helping poorer nations. The only way to improve the standard of living in other nations is to offer them jobs. If we want other nations to move beyond just farming and manufacturing we *must* make sure that we share the way we make wealth with them.
Is this somewhat painful? Yes. Does it help in the long term? Most definitely.
Do you really think that the mid east would be in the situation it is today if there was a wide diverse economy over there?
I think you are right about the desktop. Pretty much everyone I know who is informed is waiting for the 970 to purchase a desktop machine. The current PowerMacs are simply too underpowered. Don't get me wrong, I love my dual 867 I got last September. But right now you are better off waiting six months.
With laptops things are different. I think that there Apple is very competitive with x86 offerings, depending upon how you use them.
Anyway, if the 970 ends up being on the same level as the high end P4 and the Athalon-64 I think you'll start to see a lot more desktop switchers.
There's more room for ambiguity in the humnaities, true, but that ambiguity is always within what Eco has right called (in his book of this title) "the limits of interpretation."
The problem is that the range of grades allowed within the limits of interpretation is quite large. I remember a few years back where the same paper was given to multiple professors to grade within the same course. The grade ranged from C to A depending upon professor. In the humanities in particular it is important to discover your professor's likes and dislikes and patronize them. That'll make all the difference in the world in getting a good grade. Unlike the sciences or engineering in the humanities there simply isn't enough consensus on what is expected.
Once you start throwing in all the pseudo-postmodernists within the humanities then you really do open yourself up to a relativism that is damaging for academics.
Now if one simply wants to be honest and says that unlike most knowledge in the humanity the test is manipulating the professor, then that's fine. Call it sophistry 101. Heavens, in a sense that's what classic rhetoric was about - speaking well. In our cynical age perhaps the distinction between sophistry and rhetoric is to be overlooked.
One would hope, however, that our view of the university hasn't degraded to that point.
If the "remote control" is simply talking to an other *person* then your criticism is valid. If it is talking directly to the computers *controlling* the ship, then it is invalid.
Afterall if someone used a radio or even semaphors to "fake" a message there would be humans in the loop to second guess it. The danger I see is that this crucial human element may be eliminated.
To simply see this as some new Luddite movement is to miss the nature of the criticism. And it applies to more than just this story but questions the very nature of computer based command and control where the human element is reduced. Yes I recognize that some in the military recognize this problem. Yes there are technological methods for reducing the problem. (i.e. encryption, shielding, etc.) However we are moving more and more to a system where computer have knowledge of where troops/assets are and controls them. The fact that no enemy has attempted to undermine this with electronic warefare doesn't mean it isn't a weakness. It only becomes a significant weakness when we take it for granted and rely on it.
Isn't that a little dangerous? It would seem, even with encryption, to leave things open to electronic countermeasures. Yeah you'll have folks on the bridge in case it starts to happen. But in battle those few minutes of confusion may give an enemy the advantage - especially in these days of asymmetrical combat. (i.e. terrorism)
So you have some terrorist who jams things or sends confusing orders to the ship. The crew is trying to figure out what is going on when WHAM the strike takes place.
If weapon systems are under control of such a remote control pad then it is even scarier.
While it may pain many readers here, a little exercise does wonders for your productivity. If you set aside 5 minutes while your program is compiling to just stretch and do some situps/pushups it will really help you. Much more than spending those 5 minutes reading slashdot. (Sorry guys - its true)
If you actually try and spend an hour and the gym a day you will find your productivity improving as well.
I don't know what it is, but it is *so* easy to get caught in the trap of lethargic sessions in front of the computer. Often the web browser is the biggest cause of problems. It is just too easy to go around browsing the same sites over and over again. P2P and chat is a close second. Really, just a little activity breaks the spell and will HELP. A few hand stretches helps avoid stress injuries as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly there still is spotty support for context menus, especially in the bookmark panes.
I do wish Apple would improve Project Builder. Why the most essential application for the system - its development environment - is as weak as it is remains a mystery to me.
Well, getting more philosophical than physicists like, technically there isn't nothing. There is space and there are the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics still rests on a fairly Newtonian view of space/time. That's one of the many reasons it is such a bear to unify with General Relativity which has a conception of space much more in tune with Leibniz' view of space.
Also the "big bang" is extrapolating back well beyond Planck time to where/when we really don't have physics to describe. So we can say that a classical view of the history of the universe (i.e. arrived at with relativity) suggests a big bang. We could say it was something from nothing, as the true big bang doesn't even have space. (Thus invalidating what I said about Newtonian space) However we really don't know what is going on that early and even if there was a big bang of the sort we think of.
This is one of those places where our cosmological speculation outstrips our physical laws. If we adopt the inflationary bubble universes, then perhaps our "big bang" really arose from a sufficiently flat space/time the vacuum fluctuations created our universe. Who knows? While it is fun to speculate, I think a lot of discussion of the "origin of the universe" ought to be presented clearly as speculation. It is moving a little too far beyond established theory for my tastes.
Of course aether was primarily brought up by Maxwell to explain certain phenomena. It was disproved by the "fact" that the speed of light was a constant in all inertial frames.
What's interesting is that there is a movement to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, the speed of light wasn't a constant after all. While I rather doubt that, New Scientist has an interesting interview with the main proponent of that theory, Joao Magueijo. Interview with Joao Magueijo
He has a book partially about this coming out this month called Faster than the Speed of Light
I rather doubt Einstein is wrong on this matter, although some of Magueijo's criticisms of superstring theory are often made. Still quite a few people are discussing the issue. Landau, for instance, has a recent paper on the topic. "Charge Conservation and Time-Varying Speed of Light.
To tie all this together, here's an interesting paper that ties some of this all together, including "dark energy." "Perfect Fluid Cosmology with Varying Light Speed."
With the older version of Fink compiling against the X11 sources improved things considerably. I'd expect that if you've updated Fink since X11.app came out this isn't necessary. In my case I made the mistake of upgrading Perl outside of Fink and that screwed many things up since Fink's expected version of Perl was different than mine. I ended up having to recompile most of my stuff from scratch. It wasn't too bad. I just let it run all night. (grin)
The problem I'm left with is that clicking on a KDE window doesn't bring it to the front over an Aqua window for some reason. Oddly this doesn't affect non-KDE windows, such as Gnome apps like Gnumeric. I can't quite figure that out.
My remaining problem is that I can't seem to copy and paste between X11 apps and OSX apps. I'm not sure why. A few people are left with some phantom processes, even after quitting X11. So that may be what is keeping copy and paste from working right. I'd started it using the kde window manager instead of the aqua-wm manager. So perhaps something was left running that was screwing aqua-wm up.
Still overall it feels faster and from my preliminary testing is much more stable.
They were very accurate. They just had very poor targeting wisdom. But they were aiming at the Canadian troops, unfortunately.
An other friend bought some bowling balls at a thrift store back in High School. They rolled it down the street to hit a curb where it would fly high up in the air - much to their amusement. They did this about 6 times until it smashed through the curb, flew off into the air and went through someones roof. Fortunately no one was home. But it taught them why dropping things isn't always a good idea.
I've been hiking in the backcountry where some stupid mfer was rolling boulders down a mountain thinking no one was around. Unless you know exactly where you are dropping things and have scoped things out, dropping things from a plane isn't too smart. (IMO)
BTW - there was an old B-movie staring Charlie Sheen where they do a cool stunt. Someone is locked in the trunk of a car and dropped out of a cargo plane. The stunt man dives after it, gets the keys out of the ignition, slides to the back, unlocks the trunk, gets the person out, clips them into their chute and then they tangent open together. Horrible movie but very cool stunt. Too bad today it would be handled via CGI. It seems like real stunts are becoming a thing of the past.
I also seem to recall some problems moving from Buddhist discussions of nirvana into a more western styled metaphysics of "energy." But that's probably neither here nor there. Is the "everyone on every plane is enlightened" technically part of Buddhism as an end state?
Or if you like some of the other Inflationary theories, you could have a sufficiently flat spacetime and simple create a new universe. Of course that assumes that "movement" between universes is possible. I don't think there is anything that indicates it is. (Although the old joke in physics about "that which is not forbidden is compulsory" may apply)
Strangely it is inconsistent. Some Win2K servers appear while other ones don't - even on the same Workgroup. I don't know why this is. I just know that right now the browsing function in the Finder doesn't work right.
Are you talking about how there is no global energy conservation due to time assymetry and Noether's theorem?
I find this an interesting fate because it's also reflected in some religions and philosophies, where everything becomes one at the end of time.
Don't most religions postulating "one" at the end of time actually have something closer to the big-bang / big-crunch? I mean the final conflagration in Heraclitus on up through the Stoics seems to have much more in common with the earlier view of cosmology. The big cruch returns everything to fire = logos that was had at the beginning of the universe. In this view the fire is raw energy and information.
I don't know of anything in traditional philosophies or religions that really corresponds to the heat death of the universe.
How do these people deal with Windows interoperability? This is actually a problem I've dealt with moving code from Windows to Linux. Case often got screwed up leading to some pains setting up Makefiles and so forth.
The general solution is a little Python program that just renames all files to lowercase. Works great. However, if there were some idiot programming in Linux who demanded not only mixed case, but made it break when anyone with any other OS used it. . . Well such a person wouldn't be working with me for long if they kept it up.
I think case sensitivity is often very helpful. However in general in English we don't distinguish based upon case. So a strong, compelling argument can be made against case sensitivity in file names.
Also, I should add that beyond the afore mentioned copying problems, I've yet to find a case where two files with the same name but different case exist in the same directory.
There are solutions to this, of course. For instance if you are printing to printers on a PC network, I'd advise getting GimpPrint. It takes a lot of Linux printer drivers for GIMP, adds some nice UI, and makes them general OSX drivers. (The underlying CUPS printing system is very nice - its just that printer dirvers often are woefully underpowered in their native OSX forms)
GimpPrint
The other solution to accessing a Windows network with a Mac is the "write it down solution." Hardly ideal, although to be fair, something Linux users also typically end up doing. There are some freeware/shareware solutions that provide browsers. Not all of them work equally though. (i.e. they don't really solve the underlying issues) The following is one that many people like. (I personally only have a few shares and thus only need to set them up once, after which "who cares?"
SMB Browse
My point isn't that this is a huge problem. (It isn't) But it is something that is vastly easier in XP than in OSX. Further many "less tech savvy" individuals will have problem hooking their Mac to their PC network. Hopefully Apple will resolve this in 10.3. (Certainly they need to seriously revamp the Finder due to its lack of multithreading and poor FTP support along with the SMB problems)
China is trying to put an astronaut in space. Kudos to them.
My favorite experiment was the sulfuric acid mixed with sugar. I thought it was so cool that I quickly used up all the acid and made my Dad go out and find a big bottle of it.
With all the regulations for liability now along with terrorist worries, it is probably impossible to even get half that stuff. No more ice cream made from liquid nitrogen now that I'm out of college.
No one knows, of course. Anyone who claims to know much beyond the "second half 2003" statement is likely talking out their ass.
Yes not everyone is plugging their CamcorderDV into their computers at the moment. But a lot are. Further look at where the main folks are pushing PCs. They want to replace your home stereo/AV system with a PC. We have Microsoft's recent releases in this, we have all those PVR systems, and we have Apple's digital hub. Use any of those systems though and you'll see that they aren't ready for prime time simply because of speed.
Is this relevant to the Itanium? Not really. That is targeted at servers which is a different market. Of course IBM is targeting the 970 as a Linux server, yet Apple is by most accounts planning on releasing workstations with it come September. (And most folks using Photoshop or Final Cut Pro are saying that it is long overdue)
Yes for those who simply do a little web browsing and word processing, computers made 3 years ago are more than good enough. Yet at the same time those aren't the lucrative market for manufacturers either. And somehow those people *do* try and play some of the new AV feeds off the net or complain about doing mild AV stuff. Once we have an integrated home entertainment environment then those people *won't* just be doing simple web browsing or word processing either.
Servers are a different beast since the processing requirements are simply different from workstations or home systems. I don't want to downplay that. However lets be honest. With most servers running even on machines from a few years ago it is bandwidth that is often the limit and not processing speed. Yeah I know of applications for which that isn't true. And there are other niche markets. But think of most of the servers you encounter. Not the ones that get the "press" or the notice, but the ones that get used the most. How many of them have their needs met by a 1 GHz Pentium4 system running Linux? I daresay most. Does it matter? No. Because those other servers that *do* require the speed still are critical.
That's why the 970, the Itanium, and the Opteron all matter. Its like saying SUVs don't matter since most people never go off road or drive in rough snow. Yet for those who do need those things the truck or SUV is critical. The fact most drive something that is overkill is beside the point.
In the computer industry the best way to innovate is to become a consultant and offer something those other outsources don't. Or better yet simply start your own business.
If what you want is a nice stable job without any effort on your part, then yes, free trade sucks. Of course along with others I see that as a very selfish position. "Screw the third world - let them live in poverty. I just want a nice high paying job that I don't have to do much for."
That's why I said I find the anti-globalism a very schitzophrenic movement. On the one hand it claims to want to help these other nations. Yet at the same time it wants to keep from those nations the opporunity to choose the same things the first world has.
Reminds me of all those patronizing climbing articles written about Nepal back in the '90s. They felt they were loosing their culture because they weren't being kept in the 19th century. Now there clearly are problems with cultural contamination. But the attitude towards all these nations seems to take a very paternalistic and self serving view. We know what's best for you. You ought to stay where you are. The problem is contact with us.
Rather than deal with the underlying issues of whether particular contact is desired or not, contact as a whole is labled good or bad. And it is done so either by a narrow view of what is good for my town or on the view that everything western is somehow bad.
While there are many problems in globalism, the fact is that thinking globally is the most humanistic and charitable thing to do. The fact is that those programmers in India are not somehow less deserving than the programmers in your town or even the next town over.
Is this somewhat painful? Yes. Does it help in the long term? Most definitely.
Do you really think that the mid east would be in the situation it is today if there was a wide diverse economy over there?
With laptops things are different. I think that there Apple is very competitive with x86 offerings, depending upon how you use them.
Anyway, if the 970 ends up being on the same level as the high end P4 and the Athalon-64 I think you'll start to see a lot more desktop switchers.
There's more room for ambiguity in the humnaities, true, but that ambiguity is always within what Eco has right called (in his book of this title) "the limits of interpretation." The problem is that the range of grades allowed within the limits of interpretation is quite large. I remember a few years back where the same paper was given to multiple professors to grade within the same course. The grade ranged from C to A depending upon professor. In the humanities in particular it is important to discover your professor's likes and dislikes and patronize them. That'll make all the difference in the world in getting a good grade. Unlike the sciences or engineering in the humanities there simply isn't enough consensus on what is expected.
Once you start throwing in all the pseudo-postmodernists within the humanities then you really do open yourself up to a relativism that is damaging for academics.
Now if one simply wants to be honest and says that unlike most knowledge in the humanity the test is manipulating the professor, then that's fine. Call it sophistry 101. Heavens, in a sense that's what classic rhetoric was about - speaking well. In our cynical age perhaps the distinction between sophistry and rhetoric is to be overlooked.
One would hope, however, that our view of the university hasn't degraded to that point.
Afterall if someone used a radio or even semaphors to "fake" a message there would be humans in the loop to second guess it. The danger I see is that this crucial human element may be eliminated.
To simply see this as some new Luddite movement is to miss the nature of the criticism. And it applies to more than just this story but questions the very nature of computer based command and control where the human element is reduced. Yes I recognize that some in the military recognize this problem. Yes there are technological methods for reducing the problem. (i.e. encryption, shielding, etc.) However we are moving more and more to a system where computer have knowledge of where troops/assets are and controls them. The fact that no enemy has attempted to undermine this with electronic warefare doesn't mean it isn't a weakness. It only becomes a significant weakness when we take it for granted and rely on it.
That's what I fear.
So you have some terrorist who jams things or sends confusing orders to the ship. The crew is trying to figure out what is going on when WHAM the strike takes place.
If weapon systems are under control of such a remote control pad then it is even scarier.
If you actually try and spend an hour and the gym a day you will find your productivity improving as well.
I don't know what it is, but it is *so* easy to get caught in the trap of lethargic sessions in front of the computer. Often the web browser is the biggest cause of problems. It is just too easy to go around browsing the same sites over and over again. P2P and chat is a close second. Really, just a little activity breaks the spell and will HELP. A few hand stretches helps avoid stress injuries as well.