People want to listen to their favorite songs a lot more often than they want to rewatch their favorite movies, therefore owning songs is more attractive than owning movies.
Essentially correct, but it's not a Power5 derivative.
Together, the 2 kinds of cores on a single chip has the potential to do a lot. But there has to be tools to allow developers to make use of the potential. Especially as vectorized programs are not easy to write and optimize, that makes the quality of the development tools very important in deciding the success of the chip.
Right. And it's interesting that the CoreImage and CoreVideo APIs in the next version of OS X are designed to take code fragments and run them either on the CPU or GPU depending on the specific machine's capabilities. Doesn't sound like that would be hard to extend to Cell...
This will also kill card counting....they can see you're bet swings
They can easily notice that anyway. That's why the MIT guys used a team system; one person makes small bets, and when the count becomes favorable he signals a teammate who joins the table and makes big bets. Neither of them has to vary their bet sizes. (Of course, the casinos can counter with facial recognition, and the arms race goes on).
It's all ratings. Now, do you want those same masses dictating everything that TV tries?
But that's what happens *today*. The "masses" get Friends and Wings because each individual viewer counts just as much in terms of ad revenue as the most diehard SF fan. But let the fans back their support with dollars, and now you have a real market.
First, why would a network cancel a show when there is obvious fan appreciation.
Because under the current ad-supported system, viewer appreciation is far less important than viewer *quantity*. It's much better for a network to run a show that 10 million people watch but aren't crazy about ("it's the best thing on") rather than a more esoteric show that 2 million people watch and really like. This leads to programming with broad but shallow appeal, like reality shows and generic sitcoms.
A system where the viewers pay directly for the shows allows them to quantify their support in dollars, and would allow the 2 million dedicated fans to outbid the 10 million mostly indifferent Big Apprentice Survivor watchers. That's a good thing for both programming quality and economic efficiency.
Of course, Joel also correctly noted that customers hate it (except when it's well-marketed, e.g. senior discounts) and will often find ways around it.
And before you laugh.. rememebr we are touting Firefox is more secure, because of lack of ActiveX.
And rightly so. By the same token, if there's not a trivial fix for this problem, the proper thing to do is to put out a temporary patch that completely disables IDN until it can be corrected.
on all machines where I executve Java applet or Java applications they slow my machines to a crawl
That's just because Sun has yet to produce a UI library that doesn't suck. For non-UI tasks Java's performance has been more than acceptable for quite a while. And there are Mac OS X apps that use Java as an interface to the Cocoa API that are indistinguishable from non-Java apps in appearance and performance.
It's ugly and non-orthoganal. Look at the Arrays class for example; there are dozens of duplicated methods that are identical except that they take bytes, chars, shorts, ints, etc. as arguments. I'd much rather have everything be a true object; any performance issues can be handled by the compiler, runtime, or Moore's law. Autoboxing helps, but better to fix it for real than with syntactic sugar.
Red lights? If all cars were fully autonomous, traffic lights would be unnecessary. Simply adjust vehicular timing to ensure that no two vehicles are in precisely the same place at the same time.
Excellent point.
The difference between the transit times with packetized traffic controlled by lights and the optimal transit time from traffic doing reasonable collision avoidance (up to and including choosing lanes to miss cross traffic by as little as a five feet) is phenomenal....
Exactly. I wonder if anyone has done the math for the net economic impact of the time, lives, and energy that would be saved. I'd guess it would easily be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
Nothing. However, there is a big difference for individuals using a handheld phone.
As others have pointed out with many references, this is incorrect. There may well be a slight additional negative effect from actually holding the phone, but the main problem is the divided mental attention that's much more pronounced when talking on a phone compared to talking to a passenger.
So go to a racetrack and knock yourself out. Fully autonomous cars would be *fantastic*. Even aside from safety improvements, they'd be much more efficient. As just one example, when there's a row of cars at a red light that turns green, each car can only start moving once the one in front of it starts. Autonomous vehicles could communicate with each other and start moving simultaneously (or at least with much reduced delays). Multiply the seconds saved per intersection by the billions of times this happens every day, and it's significant.
As others in this discussion noted, talking on the phone is approximately as distracting as talking to someone in your back seat.
But both you and those others are wrong, according to several studies. As different others have mentioned here, having a conversation over the phone is worse than talking to passengers for a number of reasons, most of which boil down to passengers being more aware of your situation.
I do agree that more laws aren't needed; rather existing laws against reckless and negligent driving should be enforced. That would improve safety much more than our current system of mostly-randomly handing out speeding tickets.
If you were on the ball enough to notice, you wouldn't be impaired. If you are lucky, you'll notice some secondary effect of being impaired
Exactly. A while back I was driving home from work while talking to my sister on the phone. Once I got home and hung up, I realized I had no specific memory of actually driving while I was talking to her. I was purely on autopilot, and had there been any situation requiring a rapid response my chances of making the correct actions would have been greatly reduced. Now if I'm driving and get a call I just tell them I'll call them back unless it's an emergency.
I don't know how many times I've heard people of a market-libertarian bent denigrate the public transit system because it "costs too much" while upholding the wondrous laissez-faire wunderkind that is the highway system.
In theory highways are paid for by gas taxes, although with money being fungible that's hard to prove. Regardless, the usual objection is that most public transit systems cost far more per passenger-mile than highways.
I think that if we released OS X on a intel/intel clone platform that our operating system being a user friendly unix, that is spyware free, adware free, virtually bug free, and virtually virus free would knock Microsoft's market share out of the water.
Maybe, but there are a few critical problems. First, how much do you charge for x86 OS X? Not $129, or else Mac hardware sales would fall to nearly zero, and Apple's profit margins would be destroyed. (The mini and iBook are cost-competitive with Wintel, but not much else is once OS X is no longer Mac-only). Charge $300 or so and legitimate sales will fall while piracy increases tremendously.
Second, it would take Microsoft about 4 seconds after the release of x86 OS X to announce the cancellation of Office for OS X, which would hurt a lot. Yes, there's Pages and Keynote, and I'm sure there's an Excel-killer in a Cupertino lab, but the inevitable problem is file compatibility which will never be 100%.
Third, it would take a *lot* of resources to support a reasonable percentage of all the wacky motherboards and devices in the x86 space. Microsoft gets a free ride on this because they can get the hardware manufacturers to pay the development costs; Apple can't.
My analysis is that Apple and Microsoft are locked in a probabilistic variant of mutually assured destruction. Apple could put OS X on x86, and Microsoft could drop all Mac support, and if either does one, the other will do the other quickly. As a wild-ass guess, there's a 75% chance that the resulting war would drive Apple out of business (or reduce it to a pure iPod/consumer electronics company), and a 25% chance that Apple would gain substantial market share and put a huge dent in Microsoft's monopoly, but neither company wants to take that risk.
Does the Mac Mini really come with a slow 2.5" laptop hard drive?
Yes, although some buyers are reporting that their drives are 5400rpm (compared to the 4200rpm of most laptop drives).
f it does come with a slow hard drive, could someone stick there own 3.5" 7,200RPM hard drive in place of it?
Almost certainly not due to space limitations. There are 7200rpm 2.5" drives which you could probably use, but in most cases it will be more convenient to use Firewire external drives.
If you can put your own standard hard drive in, does the Mac Mini come with install disks or would you have to go out and buy a new copy of Mac OS X?
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There's no difference between this and netflix
People want to listen to their favorite songs a lot more often than they want to rewatch their favorite movies, therefore owning songs is more attractive than owning movies.
Also, starting July 1, companies are accountable to the FCC to make their software+hardware difficult to be "defeated or circumvented
And note that in what I'm *sure* is a purely unintentional side effect, this by definition criminalizes all open source HD recording software.
It has a general processor (the POWER5 core) core
Essentially correct, but it's not a Power5 derivative.
Together, the 2 kinds of cores on a single chip has the potential to do a lot. But there has to be tools to allow developers to make use of the potential. Especially as vectorized programs are not easy to write and optimize, that makes the quality of the development tools very important in deciding the success of the chip.
Right. And it's interesting that the CoreImage and CoreVideo APIs in the next version of OS X are designed to take code fragments and run them either on the CPU or GPU depending on the specific machine's capabilities. Doesn't sound like that would be hard to extend to Cell...
This is a bigger, hotter, less stable chip with an exotic and hard to write-for architecture.
We should reserve judgment on the "hard to write-for" until we actually have details. This alleged sample code doesn't look too bad.
This will also kill card counting....they can see you're bet swings
They can easily notice that anyway. That's why the MIT guys used a team system; one person makes small bets, and when the count becomes favorable he signals a teammate who joins the table and makes big bets. Neither of them has to vary their bet sizes. (Of course, the casinos can counter with facial recognition, and the arms race goes on).
70% of France's population was killed during World War II
That isn't remotely plausible.
The competitor is trying to make money off of my success (presumably) and my trademarked name.
So what? A trademark doesn't convey the exclusive right to "make money" off the name.
It's all ratings. Now, do you want those same masses dictating everything that TV tries?
But that's what happens *today*. The "masses" get Friends and Wings because each individual viewer counts just as much in terms of ad revenue as the most diehard SF fan. But let the fans back their support with dollars, and now you have a real market.
First, why would a network cancel a show when there is obvious fan appreciation.
Because under the current ad-supported system, viewer appreciation is far less important than viewer *quantity*. It's much better for a network to run a show that 10 million people watch but aren't crazy about ("it's the best thing on") rather than a more esoteric show that 2 million people watch and really like. This leads to programming with broad but shallow appeal, like reality shows and generic sitcoms.
A system where the viewers pay directly for the shows allows them to quantify their support in dollars, and would allow the 2 million dedicated fans to outbid the 10 million mostly indifferent Big Apprentice Survivor watchers. That's a good thing for both programming quality and economic efficiency.
Of course, Joel also correctly noted that customers hate it (except when it's well-marketed, e.g. senior discounts) and will often find ways around it.
And before you laugh.. rememebr we are touting Firefox is more secure, because of lack of ActiveX.
And rightly so. By the same token, if there's not a trivial fix for this problem, the proper thing to do is to put out a temporary patch that completely disables IDN until it can be corrected.
it doesn't make a lot of sense that this is on the Apple server.
Sure it does. GNUstep provides an easy way for Mac developers to port their apps to other platforms.
As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep.
There's many more than one.
on all machines where I executve Java applet or Java applications they slow my machines to a crawl
That's just because Sun has yet to produce a UI library that doesn't suck. For non-UI tasks Java's performance has been more than acceptable for quite a while. And there are Mac OS X apps that use Java as an interface to the Cocoa API that are indistinguishable from non-Java apps in appearance and performance.
Id like to see a kernel written in either language.
Fair enough, but at least 90% of the stuff written in C and C++ doesn't need to be.
Just curious... What's wrong with that?
It's ugly and non-orthoganal. Look at the Arrays class for example; there are dozens of duplicated methods that are identical except that they take bytes, chars, shorts, ints, etc. as arguments. I'd much rather have everything be a true object; any performance issues can be handled by the compiler, runtime, or Moore's law. Autoboxing helps, but better to fix it for real than with syntactic sugar.
Red lights? If all cars were fully autonomous, traffic lights would be unnecessary. Simply adjust vehicular timing to ensure that no two vehicles are in precisely the same place at the same time.
Excellent point.
The difference between the transit times with packetized traffic controlled by lights and the optimal transit time from traffic doing reasonable collision avoidance (up to and including choosing lanes to miss cross traffic by as little as a five feet) is phenomenal....
Exactly. I wonder if anyone has done the math for the net economic impact of the time, lives, and energy that would be saved. I'd guess it would easily be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
Nothing. However, there is a big difference for individuals using a handheld phone.
As others have pointed out with many references, this is incorrect. There may well be a slight additional negative effect from actually holding the phone, but the main problem is the divided mental attention that's much more pronounced when talking on a phone compared to talking to a passenger.
Geez, live a little. Driving is fun.
So go to a racetrack and knock yourself out. Fully autonomous cars would be *fantastic*. Even aside from safety improvements, they'd be much more efficient. As just one example, when there's a row of cars at a red light that turns green, each car can only start moving once the one in front of it starts. Autonomous vehicles could communicate with each other and start moving simultaneously (or at least with much reduced delays). Multiply the seconds saved per intersection by the billions of times this happens every day, and it's significant.
As others in this discussion noted, talking on the phone is approximately as distracting as talking to someone in your back seat.
But both you and those others are wrong, according to several studies. As different others have mentioned here, having a conversation over the phone is worse than talking to passengers for a number of reasons, most of which boil down to passengers being more aware of your situation.
I do agree that more laws aren't needed; rather existing laws against reckless and negligent driving should be enforced. That would improve safety much more than our current system of mostly-randomly handing out speeding tickets.
Either require headsets to be used or be a geek and buy a Bluetooth phone
That doesn't help. It's not physically holding the phone that's the problem, it's the split mental attention.
If you were on the ball enough to notice, you wouldn't be impaired. If you are lucky, you'll notice some secondary effect of being impaired
Exactly. A while back I was driving home from work while talking to my sister on the phone. Once I got home and hung up, I realized I had no specific memory of actually driving while I was talking to her. I was purely on autopilot, and had there been any situation requiring a rapid response my chances of making the correct actions would have been greatly reduced. Now if I'm driving and get a call I just tell them I'll call them back unless it's an emergency.
I don't know how many times I've heard people of a market-libertarian bent denigrate the public transit system because it "costs too much" while upholding the wondrous laissez-faire wunderkind that is the highway system.
In theory highways are paid for by gas taxes, although with money being fungible that's hard to prove. Regardless, the usual objection is that most public transit systems cost far more per passenger-mile than highways.
I think that if we released OS X on a intel /intel clone platform that our operating system being a user friendly unix, that is spyware free, adware free, virtually bug free, and virtually virus free would knock Microsoft's market share out of the water.
Maybe, but there are a few critical problems. First, how much do you charge for x86 OS X? Not $129, or else Mac hardware sales would fall to nearly zero, and Apple's profit margins would be destroyed. (The mini and iBook are cost-competitive with Wintel, but not much else is once OS X is no longer Mac-only). Charge $300 or so and legitimate sales will fall while piracy increases tremendously.
Second, it would take Microsoft about 4 seconds after the release of x86 OS X to announce the cancellation of Office for OS X, which would hurt a lot. Yes, there's Pages and Keynote, and I'm sure there's an Excel-killer in a Cupertino lab, but the inevitable problem is file compatibility which will never be 100%.
Third, it would take a *lot* of resources to support a reasonable percentage of all the wacky motherboards and devices in the x86 space. Microsoft gets a free ride on this because they can get the hardware manufacturers to pay the development costs; Apple can't.
My analysis is that Apple and Microsoft are locked in a probabilistic variant of mutually assured destruction. Apple could put OS X on x86, and Microsoft could drop all Mac support, and if either does one, the other will do the other quickly. As a wild-ass guess, there's a 75% chance that the resulting war would drive Apple out of business (or reduce it to a pure iPod/consumer electronics company), and a 25% chance that Apple would gain substantial market share and put a huge dent in Microsoft's monopoly, but neither company wants to take that risk.
Does the Mac Mini really come with a slow 2.5" laptop hard drive?
Yes, although some buyers are reporting that their drives are 5400rpm (compared to the 4200rpm of most laptop drives).
f it does come with a slow hard drive, could someone stick there own 3.5" 7,200RPM hard drive in place of it?
Almost certainly not due to space limitations. There are 7200rpm 2.5" drives which you could probably use, but in most cases it will be more convenient to use Firewire external drives.
If you can put your own standard hard drive in, does the Mac Mini come with install disks or would you have to go out and buy a new copy of Mac OS X?
They have real OS X install CDs.