Pfft. It took them long enough to get a
modern kernel.
Assuming you're trying to follow a thread,
and not just bashing Apple randomly, are
you suggesting that Apple engineers were
waiting for "protected memory" and
"pre-emptive multitasking" to be "proven"
in the market before they followed suit?
Apple went
through considerable internal turmoil in
the nineties, which probably accounts for
the lack of innovation in Mac OS for so
many years. They also have a much smaller
pool of developers. Before the success of
the original iMac, they probably did not
have the power to force developers to make
the big switch.
Considering the job they pulled off with
OS X, I doubt that they were just twiddling
their thumbs waiting to see if people would
buy a "modern kernel".
Even with the considerable headstart, when
is Windows NT going to get something like
Quartz Extreme?
Jobs has said in interviews that Apple
isn't getting into tablets until it's a
proven game.
The closest actual quote I could find was:
"We're not sure the tablet PC will be
successful. It's turned into a notebook
that you can write on. Do you want to
handwrite all your e-mail? We have all
the technology ourselves to do that - we
just don't know whether it will be
successful."
The subtle difference I'm trying to point
at is that Apple has not been shying away
from innovation when they believe in
it. They're not waiting for the tablet
PC to be proven so much as betting against
it, because they really need to be supplying
something PCs don't have to survive.
Every assembly instruction directly maps
to a machine code instruction, so there is
absolutely nothing hidden or being done
behind the scenes.
Nonsense. On the 80x86, for example, a
one-pass assembler cannot know if a forward
JMP (jump) instruction is a "near jump"
(8 bit offset) or a "far jump" (16 bit
offset). It must generate code to assume
the worst, so it tentatively creates a
"far jump" and makes a note of this, because
it doesn't know where it must jump to yet.
In the backpatching phase, it may now know
that the jump was actually "near", so it
changes the instruction to a "near jump",
fills in the 8-bit offset, and overwrites
the spare 8 bits with a NOP (no operation)
instead of shifting every single instruction
below it up by one byte.
A multi-pass assembler can avoid the NOP,
but the fact is still that the same JMP
assembly instruction can map to two
distinct machine language sequences. The
two different kinds of JMP are abstracted
and hidden from the programmer.
C++ is not a seperate language from C,
it is merely an incremental improvement
C++ is first of all definitely a separate
language, in the sense that a C++ compiler
will fail to compile legal C code. (Many
compilers accept both C and C++ code, but
must necessarily process them as either C
or C++, not both.) If C and C++ are not
"separate languages", then converting code
from C to C++ or C++ to C must be a trivial
task.
C++ is also a separate language in the sense
that good C++ code (the definition of which
does seem to differ depending on which edition
of Stroustrup you look at) looks little like
good C code. The STL (and templates in
general) and exceptions result in source code
that looks little like C.
it is merely an incremental improvement,
an add-on basically. That's why it's
called C++ and not D.
Stroustrup wrote: "I picked C++ because it
was short, had nice interpretations, and
wasn't of the form ``adjective C.'' in his
own FAQ. No mention of emphasis
on C++ "merely" being an "incremental
improvement".
If you're curious, yes, there was a B,
but there was not actually an A (or rather,
there was, but it was called ALGOL).
I think the original point of the poster
was that it would not make financial sense
to Apple today to risk so much money on a
project.
If so, why would it make financial sense to
enter the market after it is established?
Remember that Apple computers don't have the
benefit of being PC compatible. They also
typically don't compete on price.
There's a HELLUVA lot more development
that would go into a tablet PC/Mac
Agreed. However, the introduction of Inkwell
in Jaguar is interesting. It suggests that
software pieces for an Apple tablet puzzle
can now fall in place on the desktop, without
any new risky hardware.
The tablet in this article is 2.5 lbs,
10" x 8" x 1", with a 667 MHz Crusoe, an
8" display and a 20 GB drive for $800.
The low-end iBook is 4.9 lbs, 11.2" x 9.06"
x 1.35", with a 700 MHz G4, a 12.1"
display, and a 20 GB drive for $1,000.
I think we can expect the 700 MHz G4 to
perform quite a bit better than the 667
MHz Crusoe.
We can then strip out the CD-ROM, keyboard,
trackpad, which should shave $50 off the
production cost, and perhaps pay for the
touchscreen. More importantly, this will
make the machine perhaps a pound lighter,
and improve battery life.
That's of course not a tablet yet, but it's
tantalizingly within reach.
Apple will not get into Tablets until its a proven game.
Correct. Apple has always been a conservative
company, which is why it was slow to introduce
the GUI, the mouse, the handheld, and stayed
for so long with typical beige boxes. There's
no way they're going to abandon their aging
Mac OS kernel with a powerful Unix-based one,
for example.
Note I didn't say they invented these things,
but Apple as a company did not survive this
long by waiting to see if it can play catchup.
To make enough meat to feed 1 human, the
cow eats enough vegetables that could
directly have fed 5 humans.
I think your figure comes from corn-fed cows.
The number would probably differ for grass-fed
cows, which do not need as much cultivated
crops. It might be better if we ate less
meat, and not pump the corn-fed cows (which
can't even digest corn) full of antibiotics
and hormones, rather than stop eating meat
altogether. I don't think there's enough
evidence that cutting animals out of our
part of the food chain entirely will do
good in the long run.
It's almost inevitable, given human history,
that cow farts are responsible for preventing
global warming or something, and we won't
realize that until we get rid of the cows.
That wouldn't solve the problem. If a lot
more people become vegetarians, then you'd
need to grow more vegetables. That means
you need more pesticides, and possibly some
genetic modifications as well. Fact is,
the conscious American food shopper is in
a real bind today. Hormone and antibiotics
laced meat, abused poultry and pigs, pesticide
laced fruits and vegetables - what's there
to eat? There are organic foods, but can
their production scale up and cost come down
enough?
It is different. If you give the book to your friend, you no longer have the book.
Yes, I had hoped to be clear that it is
different. However, I was asking the reader
to consider the relative damages to
the author and publisher. In both cases,
the end result is that two people read the
book (let's simplify the discussion and
assume that this is a book you'll only ever
want to read once), but only one payment is
made. Why is one completely legal and the
other not?
The beamed ebook is indeed a violation of
copyright laws, as you point out. However,
I'm asking how this act damages the author
or publisher over just lending the
book, compared to stealing the book off a
shelf.
If you beam an ebook to your friend, you've made a copy. You both have use of the book.
Let's make it interesting, then. What if he
promises not to read it until I'm done, delete
it from my reader, and give him a call? Who
does that hurt now? In fact, his promise
makes the case identical to the lent paper
book case, but our act of beaming was still
illegal. Why is that?
After all, if ebooks didn't exist, one of
you would have had to buy a paper copy.
You're absolutely right. However, ebooks
(and more to the point, MP3s) do exist, and
they can be copied at no out-of-pocket cost
to the author. Thus, it makes sense for
the author to charge a smaller fee for the
second copy to get the same profit. Thus,
if the second copy was not paid for, the
author lost less than if he lost the first
copy (shoplifting).
Let me be clear: I'm not opposing copyright.
However, I am arguing that copyright violation
is not equivalent to theft. It causes less
damage to the owner, and should carry a
lighter penalty under law. In fact, in an
age where copying is never cheaper or more
convenient, it may be time to rethink how
else we can protect artists, rather than
cripple the technology we already have.
Imagine if the printing presses were
artificially limited to the rate of production
that the monks had copying by hand.
I fail to see how making something faster changes it's nature.
It doesn't change its nature, in
the limited sense that it's still just
passing bits around. However, a serial
cable is by application a phone modem cable,
a download cable for PDAs, or a printer
cable for a really low-end printer. A
Firewire cable can be a real time digital
video editing cable, an external hard
drive cable, or a networking cable.
The fact that Firewire can transmit x bits
per second is unimpressive. The fact that
x bps means digital video is now possible
on the desktop, on the other hand, is
remarkable.
Copying work without the owners permission is theft.
Killing someone is murder.
Oh, wait, except when the fetus isn't born yet,
then it's abortion. Legal in some places.
Oh, wait, except when the guy is a murderer
being executed by the State. Legal in some
places.
Oh, wait, except when he's trying to kill
you and you shoot him first, then it's
self defense, and legal probably everywhere.
Oh, wait, except when the guy is really old
and sick and would rather die. I don't know
if euthanasia is legal anywhere yet, but it's
at least being argued.
Oh, wait, except when you kill yourself,
then it's not a crime nearly everywhere.
So no, it's not theft the same way
shoplifting is. The damage (lost potential
sale) done to the victim is simply not
the same as if the CD was shoplifted. In
fact, the damage you make may be less than
setting up a website to say how much the
album sucks. Think about that, because
it's protected free speech.
Note that I'm not saying it's right, just
that it's not black and white like physical
theft. Specifically, there should be a
difference (in law) between someone who
"pirates" for personal use, and someone
who distributes, because they cause different
damages.
Think of a paper book. You can buy it,
read it, and give it to your friend to read.
In fact, two people read the book, and only
paid once. Now, how is that substantially
different from beaming an ebook to your
friend before you're finished reading?
What about after you're finished reading?
It is different, by the way, because your
friend could potentially want to read it
so badly he buys his own copy - potential
lost sale. However, the act of beaming the
ebook is not the same as shoplifting,
because its impact on the copyright owner
is not the same. Think of the difference
between murder and suicide, and while some
people consider both immoral (perhaps even
equally immoral), only murder is generally
an actual crime.
Actually, it's just "time shifting". As you
all know, it's completely legal to tape a TV
program so you can watch it later. Since
the movie will enter the public domain in
70 years, I'm just exercising my right 70
years earlier to watch it now.
Imagine what a real time machine (open source,
of course) could do to the RIAA and MPAA.
I hate it when I want to go see a movie and my friends say "Oh, just saw that. It was okay." "What do you mean? It comes out tomarrow?" "I downloaded it on Kazaa."
Somehow I still think that the solution to
your problem is not some form of copyright
protection, but new friends.
Firewire is no more, or less, versitle than USB, older serial, or even parallel ports.
The additional bandwidth itself brings versatility. Can you watch a movie, listen to Internet radio, or play a network game over a 9600 bps modem? Yes, technically. But you wouldn't, because it'd be painful.
Do you ohh and ahh over the fact you can hook up "almost anything" to a serial port?
No, because you can't. The classic serial port was already inappropriate for the bandwidth required of a printer, over ten years ago.
all other things being equal using a proprietary software driver under linux puts you at a competitive disadvantage. If ATI's open source drivers had as solid an openGL feature set as NVidia's under linux, I'd switch in a second.
Exactly what good would it do NVidia if they
opened their sources so that ATI can copy it
and have a "solid OpenGL feature set" like
them?
In most RTOS's, a task can starve any
other task running at the same priority
(or lower).
Some RTOSes decay the priority of the
running task over time, so that it
eventually allows other tasks of originally
equal priorities (now higher priorities due
to the decay) to run. Other strategies
are available, such as a round robin
scheduler among tasks of equal priority.
Same as the cooperative multitasking
model in Windows 3.1.
Nonsense. A higher priority task that
unblocks will get the CPU right back in
an RTOS. In a cooperative multitasking OS
it must wait for the current task to block,
by definition.
No matter what happens Microsoft will
appeal to the Supreme Court.
That doesn't mean the US Supreme Court will
even hear the case. The Supreme Court's job
is to hear cases that are good examples of
bad (poorly written, overreaching, etc)
federal laws. For example, a federal
law interpreted differently in two lower
courts might be a good candidate.
So if it's just a matter of not being happy
with a unanimous ruling, it's not likely to
reach the Supreme Court at all. They're not
there to right every wrong, even if the
verdict was in fact wrong.
There's no question they are useful.
However, is it really an efficient use of
resources (your resources!) to own one?
For a few people, yes. For a significant
number of pickup truck owners, it's probably
cheaper and more environmentally friendly
to rent one every so often.
Why would I ever want to be bored when
I could be excited, and the only necessary
change is what car I'm in?
The highways were not built for amusement,
and driving on a highway is not supposed to
be amusing. It's supposed to transport you
somewhere.
Since I can't imagine much excitement driving
at around the speed limit, I'd suggest you
take your impressive sports car off the road
and on to a race track.
I[f] you use the LASER, the second half
of the problem goes away!
No, it doesn't, and you point it out
yourself:
It uses an electronically steered RADAR
to track incoming targets, shoot a gattling
gun in the direction of the target, then
tracks both the incoming target & the
outgoing rounds, uses this data to modify
the direction the guns are pointed.
If you replace the gun with a laser whose
beam you cannot track, this method is
missing a data point. Put another way,
everything in the current system is working
in the same coordinate system - the radar's.
If you use a laser, then you have two
disjoint coordinate systems - the radar's,
and the laser's - because you do not have
radar feedback of where the laser is pointed.
The laser must be kept in perfect calibration
with the radar, in order to convert its
coordinates into radar coordinates. Basic
trigonometry tells us that any error will
be multiplied over distance, and negatively
impact the effective range of the weapon.
There are other problems. A gun has a
simple maximum range, so your software can
ignore all "friendlies" outside that range.
A powerful laser may effectively have
infinite range (destroys everything within
line of sight, whatever altitude). You'll
then need to make sure that you don't end up
shooting down your own fighters and missiles.
Point is, technical problems don't "go away"
so much as they are replaced by other
technical problems.
The G3 version costs $1,485, plus shipping.
The G4 version costs $1,985, plus shipping.
The person who asked the question wants to
use it as a desktop computer, but this only
has a 10 GB drive, no video card, and no
CD-ROM drive.
At the price of the G3, you can get an iMac
which is superior in just about every way
(for desktop applications) except the RAM
size.
So, if a foreign leader order the
assassination of US citizens (never mind
that it was an ex-President), we should
laugh it off as No Biggie?
The CIA used to do this regularly, until
it was banned by President Ford in 1976.
After September 11, President Bush signed
an intelligence "finding" instructing the
CIA to engage in "lethal covert operations"
to destroy Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda
organization.
Let me separate the two very carefully. I
think that assassination is murder. It
deprives an accused person of the human
right to due process. However, relative to
starting a war - which can kill tens of
thousands - yes, it's closer to "no biggie"
than it is to "casus belli".
Getting fonts right isn't just about
installing them. Examine the
screenshot from the article, and look at
the Tahoma sample text (fifth from top).
It is clear that the "q" and "r" and "Q"
and "R" need more space between them. The
"c" and "d" of Thorndale and Times New
Roman, on the other hand, have too much
space between them. Note also that you
can probably spot these anomalies without
even reading the text closely.
Also, it's not hard to confuse Qt (and maybe
also Gtk) or a window manager with fonts.
Pick a strange font or size, and the
resulting size of buttons and such often
become ugly or overlap incorrectly with
decorations.
So, no, despite FreeType and friends (which
are wonderful), we're not done with fonts yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you're trying to follow a thread, and not just bashing Apple randomly, are you suggesting that Apple engineers were waiting for "protected memory" and "pre-emptive multitasking" to be "proven" in the market before they followed suit?
Apple went through considerable internal turmoil in the nineties, which probably accounts for the lack of innovation in Mac OS for so many years. They also have a much smaller pool of developers. Before the success of the original iMac, they probably did not have the power to force developers to make the big switch.
Considering the job they pulled off with OS X, I doubt that they were just twiddling their thumbs waiting to see if people would buy a "modern kernel".
Even with the considerable headstart, when is Windows NT going to get something like Quartz Extreme?
This is true and by design. However, there are so many C++ constructs not C++ should not be considered an "incremental improvement" anymore.
The ANSI C++ Standard, for example, is four times the size of the ANSI C Standard.
The closest actual quote I could find was: "We're not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It's turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your e-mail? We have all the technology ourselves to do that - we just don't know whether it will be successful."
The subtle difference I'm trying to point at is that Apple has not been shying away from innovation when they believe in it. They're not waiting for the tablet PC to be proven so much as betting against it, because they really need to be supplying something PCs don't have to survive.
Nonsense. On the 80x86, for example, a one-pass assembler cannot know if a forward JMP (jump) instruction is a "near jump" (8 bit offset) or a "far jump" (16 bit offset). It must generate code to assume the worst, so it tentatively creates a "far jump" and makes a note of this, because it doesn't know where it must jump to yet. In the backpatching phase, it may now know that the jump was actually "near", so it changes the instruction to a "near jump", fills in the 8-bit offset, and overwrites the spare 8 bits with a NOP (no operation) instead of shifting every single instruction below it up by one byte.
A multi-pass assembler can avoid the NOP, but the fact is still that the same JMP assembly instruction can map to two distinct machine language sequences. The two different kinds of JMP are abstracted and hidden from the programmer.
Typically, assemblers also provide:
- Symbolic constants
- Symbolic addresses
- Macro definition and expansion
- Numeric operators and conversion on
constants
- Strings
which are all useful abstractions.C++ is first of all definitely a separate language, in the sense that a C++ compiler will fail to compile legal C code. (Many compilers accept both C and C++ code, but must necessarily process them as either C or C++, not both.) If C and C++ are not "separate languages", then converting code from C to C++ or C++ to C must be a trivial task.
C++ is also a separate language in the sense that good C++ code (the definition of which does seem to differ depending on which edition of Stroustrup you look at) looks little like good C code. The STL (and templates in general) and exceptions result in source code that looks little like C.
it is merely an incremental improvement, an add-on basically. That's why it's called C++ and not D.
Stroustrup wrote: "I picked C++ because it was short, had nice interpretations, and wasn't of the form ``adjective C.'' in his own FAQ. No mention of emphasis on C++ "merely" being an "incremental improvement".
If you're curious, yes, there was a B, but there was not actually an A (or rather, there was, but it was called ALGOL).
B came from BCPL.
If so, why would it make financial sense to enter the market after it is established? Remember that Apple computers don't have the benefit of being PC compatible. They also typically don't compete on price.
There's a HELLUVA lot more development that would go into a tablet PC/Mac
Agreed. However, the introduction of Inkwell in Jaguar is interesting. It suggests that software pieces for an Apple tablet puzzle can now fall in place on the desktop, without any new risky hardware.
The tablet in this article is 2.5 lbs, 10" x 8" x 1", with a 667 MHz Crusoe, an 8" display and a 20 GB drive for $800.
The low-end iBook is 4.9 lbs, 11.2" x 9.06" x 1.35", with a 700 MHz G4, a 12.1" display, and a 20 GB drive for $1,000. I think we can expect the 700 MHz G4 to perform quite a bit better than the 667 MHz Crusoe.
We can then strip out the CD-ROM, keyboard, trackpad, which should shave $50 off the production cost, and perhaps pay for the touchscreen. More importantly, this will make the machine perhaps a pound lighter, and improve battery life.
That's of course not a tablet yet, but it's tantalizingly within reach.
Correct. Apple has always been a conservative company, which is why it was slow to introduce the GUI, the mouse, the handheld, and stayed for so long with typical beige boxes. There's no way they're going to abandon their aging Mac OS kernel with a powerful Unix-based one, for example.
Note I didn't say they invented these things, but Apple as a company did not survive this long by waiting to see if it can play catchup.
I think your figure comes from corn-fed cows. The number would probably differ for grass-fed cows, which do not need as much cultivated crops. It might be better if we ate less meat, and not pump the corn-fed cows (which can't even digest corn) full of antibiotics and hormones, rather than stop eating meat altogether. I don't think there's enough evidence that cutting animals out of our part of the food chain entirely will do good in the long run.
It's almost inevitable, given human history, that cow farts are responsible for preventing global warming or something, and we won't realize that until we get rid of the cows.
That wouldn't solve the problem. If a lot more people become vegetarians, then you'd need to grow more vegetables. That means you need more pesticides, and possibly some genetic modifications as well. Fact is, the conscious American food shopper is in a real bind today. Hormone and antibiotics laced meat, abused poultry and pigs, pesticide laced fruits and vegetables - what's there to eat? There are organic foods, but can their production scale up and cost come down enough?
Yes, I had hoped to be clear that it is different. However, I was asking the reader to consider the relative damages to the author and publisher. In both cases, the end result is that two people read the book (let's simplify the discussion and assume that this is a book you'll only ever want to read once), but only one payment is made. Why is one completely legal and the other not?
The beamed ebook is indeed a violation of copyright laws, as you point out. However, I'm asking how this act damages the author or publisher over just lending the book, compared to stealing the book off a shelf.
If you beam an ebook to your friend, you've made a copy. You both have use of the book.
Let's make it interesting, then. What if he promises not to read it until I'm done, delete it from my reader, and give him a call? Who does that hurt now? In fact, his promise makes the case identical to the lent paper book case, but our act of beaming was still illegal. Why is that?
After all, if ebooks didn't exist, one of you would have had to buy a paper copy.
You're absolutely right. However, ebooks (and more to the point, MP3s) do exist, and they can be copied at no out-of-pocket cost to the author. Thus, it makes sense for the author to charge a smaller fee for the second copy to get the same profit. Thus, if the second copy was not paid for, the author lost less than if he lost the first copy (shoplifting).
Let me be clear: I'm not opposing copyright. However, I am arguing that copyright violation is not equivalent to theft. It causes less damage to the owner, and should carry a lighter penalty under law. In fact, in an age where copying is never cheaper or more convenient, it may be time to rethink how else we can protect artists, rather than cripple the technology we already have.
Imagine if the printing presses were artificially limited to the rate of production that the monks had copying by hand.
It doesn't change its nature, in the limited sense that it's still just passing bits around. However, a serial cable is by application a phone modem cable, a download cable for PDAs, or a printer cable for a really low-end printer. A Firewire cable can be a real time digital video editing cable, an external hard drive cable, or a networking cable.
The fact that Firewire can transmit x bits per second is unimpressive. The fact that x bps means digital video is now possible on the desktop, on the other hand, is remarkable.
Killing someone is murder.
Oh, wait, except when the fetus isn't born yet, then it's abortion. Legal in some places.
Oh, wait, except when the guy is a murderer being executed by the State. Legal in some places.
Oh, wait, except when he's trying to kill you and you shoot him first, then it's self defense, and legal probably everywhere.
Oh, wait, except when the guy is really old and sick and would rather die. I don't know if euthanasia is legal anywhere yet, but it's at least being argued.
Oh, wait, except when you kill yourself, then it's not a crime nearly everywhere.
So no, it's not theft the same way shoplifting is. The damage (lost potential sale) done to the victim is simply not the same as if the CD was shoplifted. In fact, the damage you make may be less than setting up a website to say how much the album sucks. Think about that, because it's protected free speech.
Note that I'm not saying it's right, just that it's not black and white like physical theft. Specifically, there should be a difference (in law) between someone who "pirates" for personal use, and someone who distributes, because they cause different damages.
Think of a paper book. You can buy it, read it, and give it to your friend to read. In fact, two people read the book, and only paid once. Now, how is that substantially different from beaming an ebook to your friend before you're finished reading? What about after you're finished reading?
It is different, by the way, because your friend could potentially want to read it so badly he buys his own copy - potential lost sale. However, the act of beaming the ebook is not the same as shoplifting, because its impact on the copyright owner is not the same. Think of the difference between murder and suicide, and while some people consider both immoral (perhaps even equally immoral), only murder is generally an actual crime.
Actually, it's just "time shifting". As you all know, it's completely legal to tape a TV program so you can watch it later. Since the movie will enter the public domain in 70 years, I'm just exercising my right 70 years earlier to watch it now.
Imagine what a real time machine (open source, of course) could do to the RIAA and MPAA.
Somehow I still think that the solution to your problem is not some form of copyright protection, but new friends.
The additional bandwidth itself brings versatility. Can you watch a movie, listen to Internet radio, or play a network game over a 9600 bps modem? Yes, technically. But you wouldn't, because it'd be painful.
Do you ohh and ahh over the fact you can hook up "almost anything" to a serial port?
No, because you can't. The classic serial port was already inappropriate for the bandwidth required of a printer, over ten years ago.
You killed my code morphing CPU. Prepare to die!
Exactly what good would it do NVidia if they opened their sources so that ATI can copy it and have a "solid OpenGL feature set" like them?
Some RTOSes decay the priority of the running task over time, so that it eventually allows other tasks of originally equal priorities (now higher priorities due to the decay) to run. Other strategies are available, such as a round robin scheduler among tasks of equal priority.
Same as the cooperative multitasking model in Windows 3.1.
Nonsense. A higher priority task that unblocks will get the CPU right back in an RTOS. In a cooperative multitasking OS it must wait for the current task to block, by definition.
That doesn't mean the US Supreme Court will even hear the case. The Supreme Court's job is to hear cases that are good examples of bad (poorly written, overreaching, etc) federal laws. For example, a federal law interpreted differently in two lower courts might be a good candidate.
So if it's just a matter of not being happy with a unanimous ruling, it's not likely to reach the Supreme Court at all. They're not there to right every wrong, even if the verdict was in fact wrong.
There's no question they are useful. However, is it really an efficient use of resources (your resources!) to own one? For a few people, yes. For a significant number of pickup truck owners, it's probably cheaper and more environmentally friendly to rent one every so often.
Why would I ever want to be bored when I could be excited, and the only necessary change is what car I'm in?
The highways were not built for amusement, and driving on a highway is not supposed to be amusing. It's supposed to transport you somewhere.
Since I can't imagine much excitement driving at around the speed limit, I'd suggest you take your impressive sports car off the road and on to a race track.
No, it doesn't, and you point it out yourself:
It uses an electronically steered RADAR to track incoming targets, shoot a gattling gun in the direction of the target, then tracks both the incoming target & the outgoing rounds, uses this data to modify the direction the guns are pointed.
If you replace the gun with a laser whose beam you cannot track, this method is missing a data point. Put another way, everything in the current system is working in the same coordinate system - the radar's. If you use a laser, then you have two disjoint coordinate systems - the radar's, and the laser's - because you do not have radar feedback of where the laser is pointed. The laser must be kept in perfect calibration with the radar, in order to convert its coordinates into radar coordinates. Basic trigonometry tells us that any error will be multiplied over distance, and negatively impact the effective range of the weapon.
There are other problems. A gun has a simple maximum range, so your software can ignore all "friendlies" outside that range. A powerful laser may effectively have infinite range (destroys everything within line of sight, whatever altitude). You'll then need to make sure that you don't end up shooting down your own fighters and missiles.
Point is, technical problems don't "go away" so much as they are replaced by other technical problems.
Somehow I doubt that there'll be a big market demand for original movies made by ubergeeks.
The G3 version costs $1,485, plus shipping. The G4 version costs $1,985, plus shipping. The person who asked the question wants to use it as a desktop computer, but this only has a 10 GB drive, no video card, and no CD-ROM drive.
At the price of the G3, you can get an iMac which is superior in just about every way (for desktop applications) except the RAM size.
The CIA used to do this regularly, until it was banned by President Ford in 1976. After September 11, President Bush signed an intelligence "finding" instructing the CIA to engage in "lethal covert operations" to destroy Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization.
Let me separate the two very carefully. I think that assassination is murder. It deprives an accused person of the human right to due process. However, relative to starting a war - which can kill tens of thousands - yes, it's closer to "no biggie" than it is to "casus belli".
Getting fonts right isn't just about installing them. Examine the screenshot from the article, and look at the Tahoma sample text (fifth from top). It is clear that the "q" and "r" and "Q" and "R" need more space between them. The "c" and "d" of Thorndale and Times New Roman, on the other hand, have too much space between them. Note also that you can probably spot these anomalies without even reading the text closely.
Also, it's not hard to confuse Qt (and maybe also Gtk) or a window manager with fonts. Pick a strange font or size, and the resulting size of buttons and such often become ugly or overlap incorrectly with decorations.
So, no, despite FreeType and friends (which are wonderful), we're not done with fonts yet.