Apple has positioned itself in the high-end consumer market, and they've reaped the benefits of not having to play the price-slice game Dell battles with constantly.
In saying that, don't forget that Dell makes more money than Apple does.
Contrary to some of the posts here implying that Dell's position is less stable due to low margins - I'm not so sure. If Dell's efficiency and size were easy to match, why isn't somebody doing it? Dell's core competence is business rather than technology, I'll grant, but being technology-neutral in a continually evolving market like computers might be a useful degree of freedom.
Apple, on the other hand, has done well recently but strikes me as being about one misstep away from disaster. They deserve a lot of credit for stringing together the original iMac followed by the iPod. But take away either of those two product lines and things would have been very different. Apple is a home-run specialist, like Babe Ruth. Can they reliably produce a "next big thing" every 4 years or so?
You raise an interesting issue... will our new video standards last for 50 years like the first ones did?
IMHO, they will not... I think we'll see more frequent improvements. First generation equipment was all implemented in hardware with a certain number of scan lines, refresh rate, color fidelity, and encoding scheme, yet downloaded videos vary in ALL of these parameters. From the early postage-stamp animated gifs, to video clip mpg, to VCD, SVCD, xVid, and now full DVD rips seem to be catching on. And even HDTV features not 1 but 3 different resolutions, which is a step in the right direction for special-purpose TV hardware.
To me the competition isn't so much the theaters, but the movies I already get at home.
The cable company already sends dozens or hundreds of movies to my house every month, and the ones on HBO are pretty new. My homebrew PVR is so stuffed with movies I can't put a dent in the backlog. I can't see the movie co.'s going lower than you $5 figure, but I doubt I would pay it very often.
So, how far do you want to take this? Everything affects other people. A person who drives twice as much as another creates twice the risk of killing an innocent victim, what do you propose to do about it? People who drive large vehicles create extra risk for other drivers and pedestrians, should we allow that? There are more preventable deaths due to diet and exercise than seatbelt neglect, what shall we do about it? Some people want to live in areas where natural disasters are more common, what shall we do with them?
If you include plugins, I guess dynamic web pages could be based on any of a HUGE number of technologies.
Which is why the success of Ajax surprises me. Why is it taking off where Java applets attempted similar things 10 years ago with great hooplah, and never really caught on? Or is this talk of Ajax just hype?
I'm not up on this, but was WindowsXP activation defeated? Last I heard people were using a leaked corporate key or renewing an old evaluation version because the activation hadn't really been defeated.
Well, the Democrats did defeat the bill. About the best the editors could have done is put the title of the bill in scare-quotes.
This is how it always works. It's called a poison pill, and both sides do it. You put together a basically good-sounding bill with some riders which are either pork or serve special interest groups. Then if it doesn't pass, you say "Look! The other side is against national security / eductation / freedom of speech / whatever."
Besides, the fact is the campaign finance law does regulate speech. It limits parties' freedom to "speak" (e.g. buy advertising) for a candiate. Now, I happen to be in favor of this particular restriction of speech because I think it serves a greater good in preserving democracy (including free speech) in the long run... but you have to realize a lot of people are against the campaign finance laws and see them as an unwarranted limitation on free speech.
Too ahead of its time? I'd say the opposite is true... SGI survived so long as they stayed ahead of the competition. Their customers paid through the nose for goods only SGI could provide. But when their tech. was rivaled by commodity PC hardware, it was all over.
The limitation of most acoustical drivers is that by design, they need to reciprocate and most of the power is wasted in accelerating and decelerating mass.
I don't see how that would be a factor at these low ( 20 hz) frequencies. Accelerating a paper cone ten times per second can't take that much energy, can it? (Except for the air drag, which is kinda the point.)
I thought things were going more towards arrays of smaller telescopes. It's hard for me to imagine a single piece of glass 30 meters in diameter, with any precision at all. Surely the sagging from gravity alone would wreak havoc as it was aimed. Am I totally misunderstanding this project, and why not an array of smaller 'scopes whose total area is pi*15^2?
It's easier for me to copy a file using a passwordless ssh key than it is to use ftp.
But don't you see, the inconvenient password-protected applications you mention wouldn't need passwords at all if not for security.
It's true that a particular app can be more secure and more usable than another particular app; insecurity certainly doesn't guarantee usability! So, yes, I think a book like the one being discussed could be a great thing. Besides, in the real world security is sometimes more important that usability.
But I still hold that usability and security are essentially in tension. Usability is about enabling people to do things, while security is about preventing people from doing things. Ideally you'd prevent all the bad things while allowing all the good things, but in the real world that never quite happens.
I know a guy who's in the grease disposal business (seriously)... most of it currently goes back into cattle feed (that's right, cattle fatten on cattle oil), but at today's high prices using it for fuel become feasible. The only issue he mentioned was you have to burn some real diesel before letting the engine cool down or the cow grease will congeal and clog it up.
I wonder who will be the first to car jack this million dollar test car and take it to Mexico.
Did you look at it? I don't think theft will be an issue.
Re:"security applications and systems" only??
on
Security and Usability
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The adage that security is the opposite of usability is false, of course.
IMHO they generally are. Having worked at a secure facility, it is expensive and inconvenient. That trickles all the way down to the desktop PC, having apps broken by firewalls, not being able to install software needed to get the job done, being unable to get access to network services I need because I can't keep track of dozens of randomly generated passwords that change every 6 months, having a computer that runs like molasses because of virus checking and software inventory daemons, being way behind the upgrade curve... it just goes on.
If I were to takeover a company like Pixar, let's be honest here... name me 2 or 3 animators that you know for sure works there? If you're not really into the animations industry (or are not a fan of the particular artists), you'd be hard pressed to come up with those names. It's all abound the branding, baby.
That's just a recipe for running a brand name into the ground. Strength of reputation will only carry a gutted company for a very short time period.
I wouldn't buy a $500 card either but, sheesh, at least they're faster than the cheap ones. This low-latency memory is twice the price for a ~3% boost... I think not.
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to some of the posts here implying that Dell's position is less stable due to low margins - I'm not so sure. If Dell's efficiency and size were easy to match, why isn't somebody doing it? Dell's core competence is business rather than technology, I'll grant, but being technology-neutral in a continually evolving market like computers might be a useful degree of freedom.
Apple, on the other hand, has done well recently but strikes me as being about one misstep away from disaster. They deserve a lot of credit for stringing together the original iMac followed by the iPod. But take away either of those two product lines and things would have been very different. Apple is a home-run specialist, like Babe Ruth. Can they reliably produce a "next big thing" every 4 years or so?
That's right, let us act quickly and decisively to protect the moon against deforestation, overfishing, and air pollution.
I suppose the FBI is at least as interested in traffic analysis as anything else. If you get under 5 social network hops to Osama... WHACK!!
IMHO, they will not... I think we'll see more frequent improvements. First generation equipment was all implemented in hardware with a certain number of scan lines, refresh rate, color fidelity, and encoding scheme, yet downloaded videos vary in ALL of these parameters. From the early postage-stamp animated gifs, to video clip mpg, to VCD, SVCD, xVid, and now full DVD rips seem to be catching on. And even HDTV features not 1 but 3 different resolutions, which is a step in the right direction for special-purpose TV hardware.
To me the competition isn't so much the theaters, but the movies I already get at home. The cable company already sends dozens or hundreds of movies to my house every month, and the ones on HBO are pretty new. My homebrew PVR is so stuffed with movies I can't put a dent in the backlog. I can't see the movie co.'s going lower than you $5 figure, but I doubt I would pay it very often.
I looked it up on their website.
Which is why the success of Ajax surprises me. Why is it taking off where Java applets attempted similar things 10 years ago with great hooplah, and never really caught on? Or is this talk of Ajax just hype?
I'm not up on this, but was WindowsXP activation defeated? Last I heard people were using a leaked corporate key or renewing an old evaluation version because the activation hadn't really been defeated.
This is how it always works. It's called a poison pill, and both sides do it. You put together a basically good-sounding bill with some riders which are either pork or serve special interest groups. Then if it doesn't pass, you say "Look! The other side is against national security / eductation / freedom of speech / whatever."
Besides, the fact is the campaign finance law does regulate speech. It limits parties' freedom to "speak" (e.g. buy advertising) for a candiate. Now, I happen to be in favor of this particular restriction of speech because I think it serves a greater good in preserving democracy (including free speech) in the long run... but you have to realize a lot of people are against the campaign finance laws and see them as an unwarranted limitation on free speech.
Too ahead of its time? I'd say the opposite is true... SGI survived so long as they stayed ahead of the competition. Their customers paid through the nose for goods only SGI could provide. But when their tech. was rivaled by commodity PC hardware, it was all over.
The article doesn't say it's a segmented mirror at all. It says "with a lens 30 metres in diameter."
I thought things were going more towards arrays of smaller telescopes. It's hard for me to imagine a single piece of glass 30 meters in diameter, with any precision at all. Surely the sagging from gravity alone would wreak havoc as it was aimed. Am I totally misunderstanding this project, and why not an array of smaller 'scopes whose total area is pi*15^2?
It's true that a particular app can be more secure and more usable than another particular app; insecurity certainly doesn't guarantee usability! So, yes, I think a book like the one being discussed could be a great thing. Besides, in the real world security is sometimes more important that usability.
But I still hold that usability and security are essentially in tension. Usability is about enabling people to do things, while security is about preventing people from doing things. Ideally you'd prevent all the bad things while allowing all the good things, but in the real world that never quite happens.
Seems like it would be hard to distinguish 1 user with multiple connections vs. several users behind a corporate proxy.
I know a guy who's in the grease disposal business (seriously)... most of it currently goes back into cattle feed (that's right, cattle fatten on cattle oil), but at today's high prices using it for fuel become feasible. The only issue he mentioned was you have to burn some real diesel before letting the engine cool down or the cow grease will congeal and clog it up.
Because you get diminishing returns for more and more cache. At some point it's better to use all those transistors as a second core instead.
I wouldn't buy a $500 card either but, sheesh, at least they're faster than the cheap ones. This low-latency memory is twice the price for a ~3% boost... I think not.
Does seem like they're riding coat-tails by mentioning google though.