Not every Apple customer is ready to embrace rapid change, especially when it means extra cost and work as well as taking a risk on critical software...
Good point. I'm looking at this as a Linux (and sometimes Windows) person thinking of getting into Apple for the first time, so the perspective is quite different. If it'll run Linux and Windows well, I can switch over to OSX gradually as it's ready.
If Apple can do anything right, it's inventory control. They are masters of having exactly the right number of units available when a new product comes out...
Regardless, this is no time for Apple to try and punish the market by trying to force us to eat our dinner before we can have dessert. If they do have G4s in inventory, they should be dumping them because they're only getting less attractive month by month. Meanwhile the Yonah-based Windows laptops have already been announced and demo'd. It's time for Apple to act.
Boy it would be disappointing if they're still just G4 models.
Assuming they're Intel-based (which is now in doubt), my question is whether there will be any barriers to running Linux and Windows. I'm intrigued by OSX, but I can't shift my work environment over all at once. Too disruptive. So if I could get a single laptop running OSX, Linux, and Windows, then maybe transition gradually to OSX depending on how I find it, that would be great.
Come on Jobs, give us a Yonah-based Powerbook I can triple boot!
DVD+-R might not be the best example, because writable DVDs are still plagued with horrible incompatibilities between players and media. The proliferation of redundant formats cannot be helping the situation.
Besides, the Windows 98 demo was a formality, since there was no competition. HD-DVD, on the other hand, faces a real challenger in Blu-Ray. This is not the way to make a good first impression.
You're overlooking the obvious... America in Iraq CANNOT play the insurgent role as in the Revolutionary War. Insurgents, by definition, exploit the home court advantage. They don't just "hide among" the local population, they are the local population, or part of it. If America were somehow invaded, I think you'd see a healthy resurgence of American insurgency.
I've perused this whole thread for some indication of *what* specifically US forces could be doing better, but I only find some ad-hoc BS about US soldiers not using their heads or not getting training. For the most part, the savvy European soldiers are not getting killed in Iraq for one simple reason... they're not there. I submit the problem is not with the soldiers, but with the mission,
There are two ways a conventional army can win guerilla wars: by attacking the civilian population, or by staying out of guerilla wars.
But how do you anticipate whether a guerilla war will precipitate in the first place? The Bush administration didn't anticipate the mess in Iraq, they thought we'd be greeted as liberators and delared "mission accomplished" after the victory in conventional warfare which was, as expected, "a cakewalk."
It would be tempting to conclude that you simply can't impose democracy, but what about Japan and (West) Germany after WWII? On second thought we did attack the civilian populations of both countries, by bombing and in particular by firebombing Germany and Nuking Japan.
Who can name some contrary cases, where an external force liberated a nation from internal suppression without resorting to mass murder and oppression? Perhaps Kosovo counts, I thought it turned out quite well.
Nobody is proposing replacing HDDs with DRAM. Obviously the parent was referring to Flash.
My question is why we can't make DRAM chips as fast as desired by simply adding more parallelism. With a HDD it's pretty obvious you can't have a dozen independent seeking heads. But with Flash, can't they divide the bank into as many subsets as desired, and access them in parallel? If not, why not?
Not that I am a big fan of windows being a Linux user since 92... but... sure you have gentoo+asterisk on that machine. Is it running X-window? Or just a console? Gotta compare apple to apple.
Please read the article. Even the Microsoft researcher who did the study agrees that Linux can outperform Windows on older hardware. His only point is that it does not do so unless customized:
Asked why he believed there was such a pervasive belief that Linux could run on older hardware, Hilf said the technical capability to modify Linux, to strip it down to run with a minimal set of services and software so that it could run on all sorts of hardware devices, had generated that larger assumption that any type of Linux distribution could run on all sorts of hardware devices.
So how significant is his point that not all Linux apps run well on old hardware? Well it depends. I guess there are some newbies who think they'll be running OpenOffice and Gnome on a P100, who need to know this. On the other hand, Linux adopters such as One Laptop Per Child initiative are fully aware that RedHat's default install is not what they want. To them, the ability to selectively install the software that meets their hardware limitations is a boon.
Video and audio are very different by degree, basically because your visual sense is so much higher bandwidth than the aural sense.
Plain old CDs from the 1980s already contain two channels of 40KHz audio, which happens to be almost exactly what a human is capable of perceiving.
In video, on the other hand, there is no such correspondence. Today's display technologies don't come close to filling your visual field, and if you try simply by blowing them up, they're hopelessly blocky. And they're still in mono (only one channel of video = no stereo vision). And they can't reproduce the full color gamut that your eye can see. Video today is about where audio was at the time of wax cylinders.
It's ridiculous. When a school kid breaks into some computer to snoop around, companies claim damages of tens of thousands of dollars because the hacker *might* have changed something. The courts just lap it up. But when Sony does something worse (not just poking around, but installing a backdoor) it's $7. When you think about all the inconvenience and expense of rebuilding a rooted box, $7 is absurd. What does giving permission to copy a few music files cost Sony? Nothing. All the cynical predictions about Sony getting off scot free were 100% correct.
From reading the article, I gather "quiet" is being used here as a technical term which is roughly synonymous with laminar, or lack of turbulence (rather than "gee I wish my vacuum cleaner were quiet").
Can anybody with the right background tell me whether that's the case?
The VGA (640x480, or actually 480x640) screens on PocketPCs look great. They're too wide for a phone, but a 640x240 screen, held in landscape mode, would work great on a phone in combination with a scroll wheel. From my own experience browsing on various Palm and PocketPC devices, the main thing to allow normal rendering is adequate width.
At least they're partnering with google instead of some cluttered "portal" like msn.com. As web pages go, google stands a better chance on low-res screens than most others.
But for hardware companies, it's a totally different story. Where do you go with a product that has hundreds of parts yet sells for $29 at WalMart? There can't be any profit in it. Worse yet, the expensive DVD players hardly work any better than the cheapies. So for the hardware comapanies, I'd say the DVD player is "done", or "dead," or whatever you want to call it. They must be itching for the next big thing.
It's another to say "Let's use more CPU (which is usually relatively idle) in order to improve the normal bottleneck, which is IO."
It's easy to go overboard with conventional wisdom, including this.
For instance, a lot of stuff now is XML, which is text based. Parsing text files takes significant CPU power, so you don't want your filesystem using it up. In my experience, simply reading in a big text file containing floating point numbers, on a 1.6 GHz Pentium-M, I found that by far the bottleneck was CPU, NOT disk speed. I switched to a lazy approach where the entire file is read at startup, but only searched for newlines. Then individual lines are parsed only as needed. Startup time was cut by over 90%.
Pursuit of economic interests is exactly what one would expect from a publically traded corporation (which has an obligation to maximize profit potential for its shareholders).
Laughable. Do you really think the promulgation of Communism is in anybody's long-term financial interests? Ask the USSR.
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Assuming they're Intel-based (which is now in doubt), my question is whether there will be any barriers to running Linux and Windows. I'm intrigued by OSX, but I can't shift my work environment over all at once. Too disruptive. So if I could get a single laptop running OSX, Linux, and Windows, then maybe transition gradually to OSX depending on how I find it, that would be great.
Come on Jobs, give us a Yonah-based Powerbook I can triple boot!
How many different format royalties are built into the price of this new player?
DVD+-R might not be the best example, because writable DVDs are still plagued with horrible incompatibilities between players and media. The proliferation of redundant formats cannot be helping the situation.
Besides, the Windows 98 demo was a formality, since there was no competition. HD-DVD, on the other hand, faces a real challenger in Blu-Ray. This is not the way to make a good first impression.
HERETIC!
or
INFIDEL!
I've perused this whole thread for some indication of *what* specifically US forces could be doing better, but I only find some ad-hoc BS about US soldiers not using their heads or not getting training. For the most part, the savvy European soldiers are not getting killed in Iraq for one simple reason... they're not there. I submit the problem is not with the soldiers, but with the mission,
It would be tempting to conclude that you simply can't impose democracy, but what about Japan and (West) Germany after WWII? On second thought we did attack the civilian populations of both countries, by bombing and in particular by firebombing Germany and Nuking Japan.
Who can name some contrary cases, where an external force liberated a nation from internal suppression without resorting to mass murder and oppression? Perhaps Kosovo counts, I thought it turned out quite well.
My question is why we can't make DRAM chips as fast as desired by simply adding more parallelism. With a HDD it's pretty obvious you can't have a dozen independent seeking heads. But with Flash, can't they divide the bank into as many subsets as desired, and access them in parallel? If not, why not?
Plain old CDs from the 1980s already contain two channels of 40KHz audio, which happens to be almost exactly what a human is capable of perceiving.
In video, on the other hand, there is no such correspondence. Today's display technologies don't come close to filling your visual field, and if you try simply by blowing them up, they're hopelessly blocky. And they're still in mono (only one channel of video = no stereo vision). And they can't reproduce the full color gamut that your eye can see. Video today is about where audio was at the time of wax cylinders.
That was back when blowing up a robot involved actual pyrotechnics.
It's ridiculous. When a school kid breaks into some computer to snoop around, companies claim damages of tens of thousands of dollars because the hacker *might* have changed something. The courts just lap it up. But when Sony does something worse (not just poking around, but installing a backdoor) it's $7. When you think about all the inconvenience and expense of rebuilding a rooted box, $7 is absurd. What does giving permission to copy a few music files cost Sony? Nothing. All the cynical predictions about Sony getting off scot free were 100% correct.
Can anybody with the right background tell me whether that's the case?
Anyways, bandwidth is cheap. I hope they offer something with a good codec that's at least 1 mbit/s.
But honestly, I don't even have a cell phone anymore. I just don't like the providers and their policies and rates.
The VGA (640x480, or actually 480x640) screens on PocketPCs look great. They're too wide for a phone, but a 640x240 screen, held in landscape mode, would work great on a phone in combination with a scroll wheel. From my own experience browsing on various Palm and PocketPC devices, the main thing to allow normal rendering is adequate width.
At least they're partnering with google instead of some cluttered "portal" like msn.com. As web pages go, google stands a better chance on low-res screens than most others.
But for hardware companies, it's a totally different story. Where do you go with a product that has hundreds of parts yet sells for $29 at WalMart? There can't be any profit in it. Worse yet, the expensive DVD players hardly work any better than the cheapies. So for the hardware comapanies, I'd say the DVD player is "done", or "dead," or whatever you want to call it. They must be itching for the next big thing.
At serverbeach you can get 2TB down the wire for $119. That's only $0.03 for each 500MB program. And I didn't even shop around.
Did they actually announce a resolution of 320x240? That would be very disappointing.
For instance, a lot of stuff now is XML, which is text based. Parsing text files takes significant CPU power, so you don't want your filesystem using it up. In my experience, simply reading in a big text file containing floating point numbers, on a 1.6 GHz Pentium-M, I found that by far the bottleneck was CPU, NOT disk speed. I switched to a lazy approach where the entire file is read at startup, but only searched for newlines. Then individual lines are parsed only as needed. Startup time was cut by over 90%.