Um, he didn't say the censorship was nonexistent, he said it was ineffective. It's amazing how every China story brings out the apologists. And these are usually the same people railing against the PATRIOT Act; I don't like it either, but it's a tiny fraction of the violation of civil liberties committed by totalitarian states like China.
I wonder if 10.5 will appear on a similar interval and be out in late 2006.
Probably not. Apple said they would be slowing down their releases after Tiger, so don't expect 10.5 before 2007. Still, that doesn't mean 10.4 won't get significant improvements. For example, Quartz 2d Extreme and resolution independence can currently only be enabled using developer tools; I expect them to become fully supported in a point release.
It's odd that we refer to "winning" an auction, when what we've really done is to prove that we're willing to pay more for an item than anyone else. How is that winning?
Because presumably the item is worth more to you than what you're paying for it. Therefore you "win" an increase in welfare corresponding to that difference. Granted you have a point that many bidders are not close to rational; I've only sold a few things on eBay, but every time I got well above what I considered a reasonable price for the item.
Providing people with productive, well paying jobs isn't the point, the point is MAKE MORE MONEY.
Absolutely. Because under capitalism (at least the ideal form), the way to MAKE MORE MONEY is to produce goods and services that your customers want. Thus, your profits are a direct result of satisfying the desires of others. It's a good deal all around. Of course, some jackasses like the guy filing this suit would rather make profits by using government force to eliminate his competition, which helps nobody but him and harms everyone else.
At some point in the future, we are going to hit a situation where our economy CANNOT, because of limitations of physical resources, be driven by growth. It will have to be steady state
I fail to see why. The only question is whether the economy will continue to grow at a similar rate as in the past, or if it will grow exponentially faster. See the Law of Acclerating Returns for more on the second possibility. Yes, space travel is expensive today; air travel was expensive 75 years ago. And computer hardware is approaching the computational power of the human brain today; once we get the software part down, look out.
I'm not against the Libre software movement, but I genuinely believe that the 'gratis' software movement is screwing things up for all of us.
Um, the former implies the latter. And your main point is just spectacularly wrong. Imagine a world where Apache, Linux, Java, Perl, Python, MySQL and all similar "gratis" software never came into being. If you want to run a web site, you have to pay thousands of dollars for the software just to get started. Will the demand for programmers be more or less than in our world? Hint: not more.
And even if free software somehow were harmful to programmers, opposing it on that basis alone is profoundly immoral, as it's an unquestionable benefit to everyone else. It would be the equivalent of candlemakers sabotaging light bulb factories to keep their jobs
The networks really seem to have a love hate relationship with Sci-Fi Fantasy fans. They are not content to cater to a smaller demographic.
This is the fundamental problem with advertiser-supported TV. (Well, one of the many problems). TV ratings are binary: either somebody is watching the show (and possibly the commercials), or not. There is no way to quantify how much somebody likes the show beyond that. If Friends has 30 million viewers who would be willing to pay an average of $1 to see an episode, while Firefly has 10 million viewers who would be willing to pay $4, Firefly should be more successful and profitable. But in the current system only absolute numbers matter, which is why "free" TV tends toward the lowest common denominator.
This leads to all sorts of cool stuff, including things like a unification of Gödel's Proof, Turing's Halting proof, Hilbert's Tenth Problem, and chaos theory.
Apple are not friends of the open source movement: they use what's there to help themselves and contribute back the minimum that they legally have to (and often in deliberately inconvenient forms)
Sorry, you don't get to slip that parenthetical in with no supporting evidence. Yes, Apple's big patches can be annoying when merging, but the realities of their business model don't always allow more convenient approaches. There's a huge difference between that and going out of their way to make their patches less useful.
so what happens when your mac breaks after a year and you didn't buy a Waranty? You eat the cost?
Yeah, but the question is how likely that is to happen, and how much you'll save in repairs or replacment if it does. Manufactuers price them to more than cover the expected repair costs, so on balance you won't get your money's worth. (Yes, this is true of all insurance, but losing your house or having a major medical problem can be disastrous, while having to replace a computer really shouldn't be).
If I buy a 1000.00 mac and it breaks in 100 days, it looks to me like i'm screwed and will have to pay someone to fix it or buy repair parts if I dont get a waranty
Apple's standard warranty is 1 year. AppleCare extends it to 3 years, but in my experience having owned a dozen or so Macs, anything that's going to go wrong is likely to show up in the first year. After that, it's usually well past 3 years before components fail due to age. Also bear in mind the effects of depreciation; if you buy a $1000 machine with an extended warranty and it dies after 2 years, the coverage doesn't save you $1000. The most it can save you is the machine's replacement cost, which 2 years later is probably closer to $500.
Extended warranties are almost always a bad deal. I've never bought or needed them for any of my Macs. The next Mac I buy could completely fail after a year and a day, and I could replace it and still be ahead with the money I've saved.
Intel is already shipping 3.8's. I know, it's not a great indicator of performance but it seems Intel has solved its manufacturing problems
Not at all. Intel was at 3GHz 2 years ago, and they've only improved by 27%. In the same timeframe IBM has taken the G5 from 2.0 to 2.7, a 35% increase. Intel was supposed to have 5+Ghz chips out by now, just like IBM wanted to. Everybody hit the same problem at 90nm, and it looks like for Moore's Law to continue we're going to have to switch to more parallel architectures like Cell.
It's been almost 24 months, and we're still < 3.0 GHz.
Which sucks, but the entire industry hit a wall at 90nm, not just Apple and IBM. Sure the G5 has only gotten a 35% increase, but that's still better than Intel.
Guys, the dual-core CPUs are a myth. They exist only as prototypes. Apple has never even so much as implied that we plan to use them for anything, ever.
Well, there were the "970MP" and "Quad" strings in the CHUD tools. And if Apple *isn't* planning on using dual-core G5s (or something better like a Cell derivative), then that would be even more disappointing.
I agree this is a decent update, mainly because it fixes the inadequate RAM and GPUs of the previous version.
I have no inside information, but I can easily deny it. Switching to x86 would be a logistical nightmare for Apple, even assuming that they have current x86 OS X builds in their labs. They would only do it if PPC fell substantially behind x86, which hasn't happened. The G4 almost did, but the G5 showed up just in time. And it's true that the G5 hasn't scaled like Apple and IBM expected, but that's an industry-wide problem. In the past 2 years the G5 has gone from 2.0 to 2.7GHz, which is proportionally more of an improvement than Intel going from 3.0 to 3.8.
Before Battlestar Galactica I would agree, now it's too close to call. But yeah, Firefly should absolutely be back on TV. Fox finally found the sense to bring Family Guy back, hopefully they can do the same here.
Swing has been a disaster. I believe it was the OTI guys (who now work on Eclipse and SWT) that told Sun not to go the route of "give me a handle to a brush and we'll paint everything ourselves", but some other group won that debate.
Indeed. The implementation of AWT sucked, but it at least had the right idea: the host OS has facilities for drawing interface elements, so use them rather than reinventing the wheel. Apple's Swing L&F is halfway decent because they use native APIs to draw widgets, and according to the article Sun is now doing the same thing for Windows and Linux. Desktop Java would be in a much better state if they hadn't gotten sidetracked for years trying to make apps on every OS look identically bad.
When the rest of the court decided to condemn the Texas anti-sodomy law as an invasion of privacy, he voted to keep it because he just plain didn't like letting queers sodomize each other.
First of all, it wasn't the rest of the court; Rehnquist and Thomas also dissented. Second, their position was not that the Texas law is a just or wise law, but that it is not unconstitutional at the state level. That's obviously a debatable position and it gets into the intricacies of the 9th, 10th, and 14th Amendments, but it's not unreasonable on its face. In fact, Thomas in a separate dissent specifically noted that the law was stupid and that he would vote to repeal it if he were a Texas legislator, but that the Supreme Court had no basis to overturn it.
Add in the "American Dream", a belief that anyone can become a corporate overlord
Not everyone is as obsessed with you are about having more than everybody else. Some just want a good life for themselves and their families, realize that free-market economies are more conducive to that, and don't really care if some other people become very wealthy in the process.
and the middle class will oppose communism as well, just in case they happen to become overlords as well
Or it could be that minor detail of Communist nations murdering over 1e8 people in the last century. Yes, I know, they didn't do it "right". But any system that has such a spectacularly awful failure mode is not one I want to mess around with.
The OMGWTFBBQSword is nothing more than an interpretation of electric signals which can only be used for one thing, entertainment.
Going to Disneyworld is nothing but entertainment. Going to the movies is nothing but entertainment. Hanging out with your friends is nothing but entertainment; after all you could be volunteering for charity. If your point is that any entertainment is immoral as long as there is suffering anywhere in the world, then you have much bigger things to worry about than MMORPGs.
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Um, he didn't say the censorship was nonexistent, he said it was ineffective. It's amazing how every China story brings out the apologists. And these are usually the same people railing against the PATRIOT Act; I don't like it either, but it's a tiny fraction of the violation of civil liberties committed by totalitarian states like China.
I wonder if 10.5 will appear on a similar interval and be out in late 2006.
Probably not. Apple said they would be slowing down their releases after Tiger, so don't expect 10.5 before 2007. Still, that doesn't mean 10.4 won't get significant improvements. For example, Quartz 2d Extreme and resolution independence can currently only be enabled using developer tools; I expect them to become fully supported in a point release.
It's odd that we refer to "winning" an auction, when what we've really done is to prove that we're willing to pay more for an item than anyone else. How is that winning?
Because presumably the item is worth more to you than what you're paying for it. Therefore you "win" an increase in welfare corresponding to that difference. Granted you have a point that many bidders are not close to rational; I've only sold a few things on eBay, but every time I got well above what I considered a reasonable price for the item.
Providing people with productive, well paying jobs isn't the point, the point is MAKE MORE MONEY.
Absolutely. Because under capitalism (at least the ideal form), the way to MAKE MORE MONEY is to produce goods and services that your customers want. Thus, your profits are a direct result of satisfying the desires of others. It's a good deal all around. Of course, some jackasses like the guy filing this suit would rather make profits by using government force to eliminate his competition, which helps nobody but him and harms everyone else.
At some point in the future, we are going to hit a situation where our economy CANNOT, because of limitations of physical resources, be driven by growth. It will have to be steady state
I fail to see why. The only question is whether the economy will continue to grow at a similar rate as in the past, or if it will grow exponentially faster. See the Law of Acclerating Returns for more on the second possibility. Yes, space travel is expensive today; air travel was expensive 75 years ago. And computer hardware is approaching the computational power of the human brain today; once we get the software part down, look out.
I'm not against the Libre software movement, but I genuinely believe that the 'gratis' software movement is screwing things up for all of us.
Um, the former implies the latter. And your main point is just spectacularly wrong. Imagine a world where Apache, Linux, Java, Perl, Python, MySQL and all similar "gratis" software never came into being. If you want to run a web site, you have to pay thousands of dollars for the software just to get started. Will the demand for programmers be more or less than in our world? Hint: not more.
And even if free software somehow were harmful to programmers, opposing it on that basis alone is profoundly immoral, as it's an unquestionable benefit to everyone else. It would be the equivalent of candlemakers sabotaging light bulb factories to keep their jobs
This is retarded... how hard was it to validate text config files before you started using XML?
Harder than using an already existing XML parser and validater.
Like you needed the XML albatross for that.
Yeah, it might take a whole 8 milliseconds to parse an XML file when it could parse a flat text file in 4.
and yet The Simple Life is still running. Does that seem right to you?
Sadly, as I said here under the current economics of TV it is "right".
The networks really seem to have a love hate relationship with Sci-Fi Fantasy fans. They are not content to cater to a smaller demographic.
This is the fundamental problem with advertiser-supported TV. (Well, one of the many problems). TV ratings are binary: either somebody is watching the show (and possibly the commercials), or not. There is no way to quantify how much somebody likes the show beyond that. If Friends has 30 million viewers who would be willing to pay an average of $1 to see an episode, while Firefly has 10 million viewers who would be willing to pay $4, Firefly should be more successful and profitable. But in the current system only absolute numbers matter, which is why "free" TV tends toward the lowest common denominator.
This leads to all sorts of cool stuff, including things like a unification of Gödel's Proof, Turing's Halting proof, Hilbert's Tenth Problem, and chaos theory.
And provably optimal AI. Truly fascinating stuff.
Did Apple really convert the whole codebase to Objective C?
No. They have an OS X specific WebKit API which is an Objective-C wrapper over KHTML, but the rendering code itself is still C++.
Apple are not friends of the open source movement: they use what's there to help themselves and contribute back the minimum that they legally have to (and often in deliberately inconvenient forms)
Sorry, you don't get to slip that parenthetical in with no supporting evidence. Yes, Apple's big patches can be annoying when merging, but the realities of their business model don't always allow more convenient approaches. There's a huge difference between that and going out of their way to make their patches less useful.
so what happens when your mac breaks after a year and you didn't buy a Waranty? You eat the cost?
Yeah, but the question is how likely that is to happen, and how much you'll save in repairs or replacment if it does. Manufactuers price them to more than cover the expected repair costs, so on balance you won't get your money's worth. (Yes, this is true of all insurance, but losing your house or having a major medical problem can be disastrous, while having to replace a computer really shouldn't be).
If I buy a 1000.00 mac and it breaks in 100 days, it looks to me like i'm screwed and will have to pay someone to fix it or buy repair parts if I dont get a waranty
Apple's standard warranty is 1 year. AppleCare extends it to 3 years, but in my experience having owned a dozen or so Macs, anything that's going to go wrong is likely to show up in the first year. After that, it's usually well past 3 years before components fail due to age. Also bear in mind the effects of depreciation; if you buy a $1000 machine with an extended warranty and it dies after 2 years, the coverage doesn't save you $1000. The most it can save you is the machine's replacement cost, which 2 years later is probably closer to $500.
Extended warranties are almost always a bad deal. I've never bought or needed them for any of my Macs. The next Mac I buy could completely fail after a year and a day, and I could replace it and still be ahead with the money I've saved.
When there aren't any post-2003 *games* available for a system, it doesn't make much sense to have a post-2003 graphics card on it, does it?
I could have sworn UT2004 came out after 2003. But at any rate, OS X uses GPUs for much more than games; see CoreImage and CoreVideo.
Intel is already shipping 3.8's. I know, it's not a great indicator of performance but it seems Intel has solved its manufacturing problems
Not at all. Intel was at 3GHz 2 years ago, and they've only improved by 27%. In the same timeframe IBM has taken the G5 from 2.0 to 2.7, a 35% increase. Intel was supposed to have 5+Ghz chips out by now, just like IBM wanted to. Everybody hit the same problem at 90nm, and it looks like for Moore's Law to continue we're going to have to switch to more parallel architectures like Cell.
From what I've hard the mac mini isn't really all that usable.
You heard wrong. You won't be playing Doom 3 on it very well, but for the vast majority of other jobs it's fine.
You would need to buy an extended waranty
You never need to buy an extended warranty. They're a huge profit source for the manufacturer, and therefore a loss for you.
It's been almost 24 months, and we're still < 3.0 GHz.
Which sucks, but the entire industry hit a wall at 90nm, not just Apple and IBM. Sure the G5 has only gotten a 35% increase, but that's still better than Intel.
Guys, the dual-core CPUs are a myth. They exist only as prototypes. Apple has never even so much as implied that we plan to use them for anything, ever.
Well, there were the "970MP" and "Quad" strings in the CHUD tools. And if Apple *isn't* planning on using dual-core G5s (or something better like a Cell derivative), then that would be even more disappointing.
I agree this is a decent update, mainly because it fixes the inadequate RAM and GPUs of the previous version.
Can anyone confirm or deny this for me?
I have no inside information, but I can easily deny it. Switching to x86 would be a logistical nightmare for Apple, even assuming that they have current x86 OS X builds in their labs. They would only do it if PPC fell substantially behind x86, which hasn't happened. The G4 almost did, but the G5 showed up just in time. And it's true that the G5 hasn't scaled like Apple and IBM expected, but that's an industry-wide problem. In the past 2 years the G5 has gone from 2.0 to 2.7GHz, which is proportionally more of an improvement than Intel going from 3.0 to 3.8.
It is by far the best sci-fi tv show ever.
Before Battlestar Galactica I would agree, now it's too close to call. But yeah, Firefly should absolutely be back on TV. Fox finally found the sense to bring Family Guy back, hopefully they can do the same here.
Swing has been a disaster. I believe it was the OTI guys (who now work on Eclipse and SWT) that told Sun not to go the route of "give me a handle to a brush and we'll paint everything ourselves", but some other group won that debate.
Indeed. The implementation of AWT sucked, but it at least had the right idea: the host OS has facilities for drawing interface elements, so use them rather than reinventing the wheel. Apple's Swing L&F is halfway decent because they use native APIs to draw widgets, and according to the article Sun is now doing the same thing for Windows and Linux. Desktop Java would be in a much better state if they hadn't gotten sidetracked for years trying to make apps on every OS look identically bad.
When the rest of the court decided to condemn the Texas anti-sodomy law as an invasion of privacy, he voted to keep it because he just plain didn't like letting queers sodomize each other.
First of all, it wasn't the rest of the court; Rehnquist and Thomas also dissented. Second, their position was not that the Texas law is a just or wise law, but that it is not unconstitutional at the state level. That's obviously a debatable position and it gets into the intricacies of the 9th, 10th, and 14th Amendments, but it's not unreasonable on its face. In fact, Thomas in a separate dissent specifically noted that the law was stupid and that he would vote to repeal it if he were a Texas legislator, but that the Supreme Court had no basis to overturn it.
Add in the "American Dream", a belief that anyone can become a corporate overlord
Not everyone is as obsessed with you are about having more than everybody else. Some just want a good life for themselves and their families, realize that free-market economies are more conducive to that, and don't really care if some other people become very wealthy in the process.
and the middle class will oppose communism as well, just in case they happen to become overlords as well
Or it could be that minor detail of Communist nations murdering over 1e8 people in the last century. Yes, I know, they didn't do it "right". But any system that has such a spectacularly awful failure mode is not one I want to mess around with.
it is no longer a game - games are ment to be fun!
I make a profit playing poker, and it's still fun.
The OMGWTFBBQSword is nothing more than an interpretation of electric signals which can only be used for one thing, entertainment.
Going to Disneyworld is nothing but entertainment. Going to the movies is nothing but entertainment. Hanging out with your friends is nothing but entertainment; after all you could be volunteering for charity. If your point is that any entertainment is immoral as long as there is suffering anywhere in the world, then you have much bigger things to worry about than MMORPGs.
Breaking a contract isn't illegal?
It's usually a tort, not a crime.