Wen the ad was first published 24 hours ago, http://www.caseydonovan.com/ was directed to a page very similar to what's now at http://www.caseydonovan.com/home.html.
There was no splash page, that must be new, and probably added after Telstra panicked and started hassling the owner of Casey "dead gay porn star" Donovan.
In the same time period Linus was writing early versions of Linux I certainly couldn't get a copy.
Furthermore in almost every interview with experienced computer science professionals, almost all said that they personally had a copy of the Lions notes, an illegal distribution of Unix source code. Even Tanenbaum admits to teaching from the Lions notes. Linus says he started with nothing. In a recent ZDNet interview(6), he denies having the Lions notes. This is also unbelievable to AdTI. The story is too amazing----everybody that I met knew Linus intimately enough to confirm he wrote the kernel from scratch--- had an illegal copy of the Lions notes---- but Torvalds, was never---even near the Lions notes.
Not having a copy of the Lions book is sure as hell not surprising to me. I was a CS student in 1990-1992 at Sydney University, which is about a quarter hour drive from UNSW, which is where Lions taught his course and published his book. I studied OS design, and wanted a copy, and could not obtain one. This is the exact same period that Linux was going from 0.01 in 1991 to 0.95c in 1992.
The book was published in 1976
The book was banned in 1978
By 1990 / 1991 it had been out of print for 12 years and was really hard to obtain.
Bandwidth outside the US was incredibly paltry, so downloading it would be very difficult. Australia (the entire country) had a single unreliable link of under 500 kbits in 1991, which was probably more than Finland.
Of course it is unserprising that all the people 10 - 15 years older than Linus who were licencees had copies: they were around when it was in print, or worked at AT&T / Bell, or knew people who did. I knew lecturers who had copies of the Lions book, but they sure wouldn't photocopy it for an undergrad (well, not me, anyway).
And as others have pointed out (including Linus), pre-1.0 versions of Linux were, well, crap. I tried it a couple of times in that period, and was less than impressed compared to the BSD derived UNIX systems we had access to at university, ignored it, and used pirate copies of 386 BSD.
Writing Linux (Freeix) 0.01 didn't require genius. Project managing 0.01 into 2.X did.
And as one of the guys who did a little work on the Apple bid I can confirm that the info posted by reverbca is accurate, and could have could have come from from someone within the RTA. The details of their internal IT are correct, anyway, as are the reasons Apple got the deal.
Another reason the iMac's moveable screen was such a hit was that it allows the RTA staffmember to show the customer an image of their licence photo before the licence is printed, which happens at the registry. (New South Wales driving licences are pinted on demand on a plastic card the same size and thickness as a credit card, and include a passport style picture. A transparent holographic image is then laminated on top to make them harder to forge.)
But if YOU were given a spec that looked like this: Replace our EOL'ed Javastations, must have
LCD screen on movable arm
fast, reliable Java implementation
strongly prefer UNIX
can't be Windows
Easy integration with head office wintel software a bonus
The DCR-22 has both a FireWire and a USB port.
Use the Firewire port, and it will just work.
Features
The full range of input and output connections are included, being one of only two in the range to do so. FireWire, MiniUSB and single-jack AV connectors are provided, along with LANC, S-Video in/out, headphone and external microphone sockets, which are situated at the front of the body.
As many have pointed out, the diamonds used in most jewellery are not rare. For "ye olde engagement ring" most people will buy (or wish they could) a 0.5 to 1.5 carat diamond, VS1 or VS2 clarity (this is the size of flaws or inclusions) and a colour of G, H or I.
To an untrained eye this diamond will appear to be white, to have no flaws they can see and will be a decent size, without being huge. My maternal family are a large manufacturing jewellery company in Sydney, and this is the "bread and butter" of the engagement ring trade. This is also the chunk of the diamond market that is most inflated by de Beers, these stones are very, very common.
The paternal side of my family are gem wholesalers who deal in rare and expensive Australian gems, as well as turning those gems into mid to high priced jewellery that is sold to wealthy tourists (mostly Japanese or American). My father is one of a few buyers who is invited to the pink diamond sales that occur at the Argyle diamond mine in Western Australia. The Argyle mine produces an unusually high proportion of coloured stones, mostly the "fancy yellows" mentioned by other posters to the thread, but they also produce something like 90% or more of the worlds pink diamonds, the (small) remainder coming out of Russian mines.
The yearly production of gem quality pink diamonds is still measured in carats, as in "each year we produce 40 - 50 carats of pink diamonds"
Check http://www.argylediamonds.com.au/polished/pinktend er_fr.htm for details (Argyle's website), but here are some sample numbers:
Pink diamond to "not pink" ratio? About a million to one
Since 1985 they've sold about 750 stones totalling 600 carats.
Pink diamonds usually start at ~ US$100,000 / carat.
The most expensive stone my father has sold was over $1,000,000 a carat
And best if all, deBeers has nothing to do with pinks. It's worth remembering that this single mine is producing about 50,000,000 carats of "normal" diamonds a year in addition to the pink, and its only the cartel that keeps these stones valuable.
Of course, all of that being said, my wife wears a "bread and butter" diamond engagement ring, just under a carat, VS1, G colour, because that's what she wanted:)
Powerbooks have twice th L2 cache of iBooks (512k vs 256k), which will improve performance by a few percent, perhaps more. In addition the RAM is PC2700 instead of PC2100, which will help as well, and they have faster graphics cards.
P'books can happily display a very high resolution desktop on an external display, and will properly span the desktop over the two displays.
If you're willing to do hairy firmware hacks, this feature can be added to an iBook as well, but I won't point you at references, as I'm disinclined to help you bust your iBook.
Nice to see the final sentence though: I'd save the extra bucks and go for a PC. Yes, iBooks are cheaper than the equivalent PC laptop, and P'Books are generally the same or less than the PC equivalents.
As mentioned by others, the majority of OS X is compiled by GCC.
The exception is Quicktime, which uses (and has used since well before OS X) a older, custom version of the IBM compilers. I believe, but am not 100% sure, that Quicktime has always used the IBM compilers on PowerPC CPUs.
This is very good news for Apple's science users, one of the real problems pushing Mac boxes into some markets has been the lack of a really good Fortran compiler. The performance boost for C/C++ code will also be appreciated.
As for a wholesale transition of OS X to the IBM compilers: next to no chance. QA of the transition would take far too long and absorb resources that could be better used on other improvements. It would also cause problems with the Open Source versions of Darwin, so expect the vast majority of OS X to remain GCC compiled.
That being said, I would expect that certain chunks will be transitioned, where it makes sense. The output of the IBM compilers is binary compatible with GCC, so you can recompile (and re-QA) chunks of the OS where you'll get a major improvment.
Quartz Extreme, CoreFoundation and AppKit spring to mind, but don't expect this to happen in 10.3 or 10.4, more like 10.5 or 11.0.
Why combine the loss of performance and added complexity of Mach with the lack of flexibility of a single (BSD) server?
Your premise is incorrect. I worked at Apple as an Enterprise SE, and asked the same question of the kernel engineers which they answered as follows: (errors all mine, accurate info all theirs)
The Mach microkernel and the BSD kernel stuff actually live inside the same memory / process space. There is no task switching performance penalty (the performance issue from "standard" Mach implementations), as you don't task switch to get from the Unix kernel to the Mach microkernel.
What you do get from having Mach is a well debugged, small set of OS primitives that the rest of the kernel can call with the performance penalty of a function call rather than a task switch.
Effectively, XNU uses the "single server" model from a performance perspective, and the BSD on Mach model when you're talking about stability, extensibility and debuggability. In addition the Mach primitives are available when you don't want to use the *NIX ones.
On vaugley modern hardware the 3D path is so much faster than the 2D path that it ends up being significantly faster to use the 3D path to render your desktop if your desktop is at all complicated (not a dozen mono xterms).
This ends up being even more true if you do any sort of complex compositing (eg: alpha blending, hardware accelerated mpeg / video, openGL windows, etc, etc). Enlightenment uses alpha channels, it would be fater to composite in hardware than software. These sorts of operations are not accelerated at all on the 2d path, and have to be done in software.
Go check out Quartz Extreme at http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.h tml (excuse the space in html).
Having used Xfree86 and Quartz extreme on the same graphics hardware, I can tell you there's no comparison. Quartz is much faster and much more capable.
Don't confuse Avgas (avaiation gasoline) with Jet Fuel. Avgas is highly refined, and marginally better than standard pump petrol. Avgas has an octane rating of 100, while standard petrol or gasoline is usually round 88 to 92 depending on the country (and sometimes the location in the country). Super or Premium petrol is usually 96 to 98 octane, though is some places you can get better(eg: Japan, where you can get 100 octane fuel from a bowser).
"Jet Fuel" is basically kerosene, and cheaper than Avgas. The price varies, but A1-jet fuel is usually about the same price as standard pump gasoline
Aviation piston engines use Avgas, aviation jet engines use jet fuel (duh!).
Lastly, the airlines purchase usually both jet fuel and avgas tax free due to international agreements IATA has negotiated, which means they often pay less for avgas than you will for standard unleaded.
Check http://www.iata.org/mgr/fuel/index and http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/info_glan ce/prices.html for details.
Hydrogen is much more expensive than any of these fuels, even in commercial quantities, and it's easy to see why if you do a little mental exercise (which is more fun than google
Think of it this way: is milk cheaper to produce and transport than hydrogen? You put grass in a cow, suck milk out of the cow, boil the milk and transport it in a big stainless steel tube. Once you package it (in cheap plastic) you need to keep it moderately cool. If you have a large milk spilling accident, it smells bad, but causes no real issues.
Hydrogen is significantly more expensive to produce and transport than milk, requiring either lots of power or propane + power and catalysts, and it's more dangerous if spilled (and therefore more expensive to transport.
Go compare the price of a gallon of milk and a gallon of gasoline. Milk is cheaper than gas. Hydrogen is (obviously) a lot more expensive than milk. Therefore, hydrogen is much more expensive than gasoline.
Wasn't that fun. Or, you could just go look it up....
WASTE is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
It allows easy colloboration across firewalls, and only one user inside the firewall is required to allow all users inside access to the mesh.
Each link is encrypted, but each message is decrypted and re-encrypted at each hop of the mesh, so you have to trust all of the nodes. It's also very hard to drop a node onc it is trusted, as each node shares public keys around to make sure all nodes have all public keys. Initial connection to the mesh requires manual key exchange. PITA, but moderatley secure.
All network traffic is encrypted, it will flood each mesh link with a minimum amount of bandwidth to foil traffic analysis.
It -is- April Fools Day in a largish chunk of the world. In fact, if you take noon as the traditional cut off for jokes, April Fools day had already finished in Australia by the time this was posted.
I'm a Unix -> OS X switcher, I can script in sh, awk, expect, etc. What advantages are there to learning AppleScript?
Is the GUI integration anything like expectk?
Slashdot Mirror
Wen the ad was first published 24 hours ago, http://www.caseydonovan.com/ was directed to a page very similar to what's now at http://www.caseydonovan.com/home.html. There was no splash page, that must be new, and probably added after Telstra panicked and started hassling the owner of Casey "dead gay porn star" Donovan.
- The book was published in 1976
- The book was banned in 1978
- By 1990 / 1991 it had been out of print for 12 years and was really hard to obtain.
- Bandwidth outside the US was incredibly paltry, so downloading it would be very difficult. Australia (the entire country) had a single unreliable link of under 500 kbits in 1991, which was probably more than Finland.
Of course it is unserprising that all the people 10 - 15 years older than Linus who were licencees had copies: they were around when it was in print, or worked at AT&T / Bell, or knew people who did. I knew lecturers who had copies of the Lions book, but they sure wouldn't photocopy it for an undergrad (well, not me, anyway).And as others have pointed out (including Linus), pre-1.0 versions of Linux were, well, crap. I tried it a couple of times in that period, and was less than impressed compared to the BSD derived UNIX systems we had access to at university, ignored it, and used pirate copies of 386 BSD.
Writing Linux (Freeix) 0.01 didn't require genius. Project managing 0.01 into 2.X did.
Another reason the iMac's moveable screen was such a hit was that it allows the RTA staffmember to show the customer an image of their licence photo before the licence is printed, which happens at the registry. (New South Wales driving licences are pinted on demand on a plastic card the same size and thickness as a credit card, and include a passport style picture. A transparent holographic image is then laminated on top to make them harder to forge.)
But if YOU were given a spec that looked like this: Replace our EOL'ed Javastations, must have
LCD screen on movable arm
fast, reliable Java implementation
strongly prefer UNIX
can't be Windows
Easy integration with head office wintel software a bonus
Would you pick anything but an iMac?
Use the Firewire port, and it will just work.
Features The full range of input and output connections are included, being one of only two in the range to do so. FireWire, MiniUSB and single-jack AV connectors are provided, along with LANC, S-Video in/out, headphone and external microphone sockets, which are situated at the front of the body.
To an untrained eye this diamond will appear to be white, to have no flaws they can see and will be a decent size, without being huge. My maternal family are a large manufacturing jewellery company in Sydney, and this is the "bread and butter" of the engagement ring trade. This is also the chunk of the diamond market that is most inflated by de Beers, these stones are very, very common.
The paternal side of my family are gem wholesalers who deal in rare and expensive Australian gems, as well as turning those gems into mid to high priced jewellery that is sold to wealthy tourists (mostly Japanese or American). My father is one of a few buyers who is invited to the pink diamond sales that occur at the Argyle diamond mine in Western Australia. The Argyle mine produces an unusually high proportion of coloured stones, mostly the "fancy yellows" mentioned by other posters to the thread, but they also produce something like 90% or more of the worlds pink diamonds, the (small) remainder coming out of Russian mines.
The yearly production of gem quality pink diamonds is still measured in carats, as in "each year we produce 40 - 50 carats of pink diamonds"
Check http://www.argylediamonds.com.au/polished/pinktend er_fr.htm for details (Argyle's website), but here are some sample numbers:
And best if all, deBeers has nothing to do with pinks. It's worth remembering that this single mine is producing about 50,000,000 carats of "normal" diamonds a year in addition to the pink, and its only the cartel that keeps these stones valuable.
Of course, all of that being said, my wife wears a "bread and butter" diamond engagement ring, just under a carat, VS1, G colour, because that's what she wanted :)
I hope for your sake that a 100 years from now your mother be a "dead technology" as well as the analogue phone.
P'books can happily display a very high resolution desktop on an external display, and will properly span the desktop over the two displays.
If you're willing to do hairy firmware hacks, this feature can be added to an iBook as well, but I won't point you at references, as I'm disinclined to help you bust your iBook.
Nice to see the final sentence though: I'd save the extra bucks and go for a PC. Yes, iBooks are cheaper than the equivalent PC laptop, and P'Books are generally the same or less than the PC equivalents.
The exception is Quicktime, which uses (and has used since well before OS X) a older, custom version of the IBM compilers. I believe, but am not 100% sure, that Quicktime has always used the IBM compilers on PowerPC CPUs.
This is very good news for Apple's science users, one of the real problems pushing Mac boxes into some markets has been the lack of a really good Fortran compiler. The performance boost for C/C++ code will also be appreciated.
As for a wholesale transition of OS X to the IBM compilers: next to no chance. QA of the transition would take far too long and absorb resources that could be better used on other improvements. It would also cause problems with the Open Source versions of Darwin, so expect the vast majority of OS X to remain GCC compiled.
That being said, I would expect that certain chunks will be transitioned, where it makes sense. The output of the IBM compilers is binary compatible with GCC, so you can recompile (and re-QA) chunks of the OS where you'll get a major improvment.
Quartz Extreme, CoreFoundation and AppKit spring to mind, but don't expect this to happen in 10.3 or 10.4, more like 10.5 or 11.0.
Odd, but true. You can check the docs at Apple if you wish, but you'll have to find them yourself, my links don't work outside the Apple firewall.
The Mach microkernel and the BSD kernel stuff actually live inside the same memory / process space. There is no task switching performance penalty (the performance issue from "standard" Mach implementations), as you don't task switch to get from the Unix kernel to the Mach microkernel.
What you do get from having Mach is a well debugged, small set of OS primitives that the rest of the kernel can call with the performance penalty of a function call rather than a task switch.
Effectively, XNU uses the "single server" model from a performance perspective, and the BSD on Mach model when you're talking about stability, extensibility and debuggability. In addition the Mach primitives are available when you don't want to use the *NIX ones.
So you DO get the best of both worlds.
This ends up being even more true if you do any sort of complex compositing (eg: alpha blending, hardware accelerated mpeg / video, openGL windows, etc, etc). Enlightenment uses alpha channels, it would be fater to composite in hardware than software. These sorts of operations are not accelerated at all on the 2d path, and have to be done in software.
Go check out Quartz Extreme at http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.h tml (excuse the space in html).
Having used Xfree86 and Quartz extreme on the same graphics hardware, I can tell you there's no comparison. Quartz is much faster and much more capable.
"Jet Fuel" is basically kerosene, and cheaper than Avgas. The price varies, but A1-jet fuel is usually about the same price as standard pump gasoline
Aviation piston engines use Avgas, aviation jet engines use jet fuel (duh!).
Lastly, the airlines purchase usually both jet fuel and avgas tax free due to international agreements IATA has negotiated, which means they often pay less for avgas than you will for standard unleaded.
Check http://www.iata.org/mgr/fuel/index and http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/info_glan ce/prices.html for details.
Hydrogen is much more expensive than any of these fuels, even in commercial quantities, and it's easy to see why if you do a little mental exercise (which is more fun than google
Think of it this way: is milk cheaper to produce and transport than hydrogen? You put grass in a cow, suck milk out of the cow, boil the milk and transport it in a big stainless steel tube. Once you package it (in cheap plastic) you need to keep it moderately cool. If you have a large milk spilling accident, it smells bad, but causes no real issues.
Hydrogen is significantly more expensive to produce and transport than milk, requiring either lots of power or propane + power and catalysts, and it's more dangerous if spilled (and therefore more expensive to transport.
Go compare the price of a gallon of milk and a gallon of gasoline. Milk is cheaper than gas. Hydrogen is (obviously) a lot more expensive than milk. Therefore, hydrogen is much more expensive than gasoline.
Wasn't that fun. Or, you could just go look it up....
It's just not possible to do that level of real time sound morphing without a G4
When we become the 51st state, of course.
Quoting from the source:
Designed for small groups of people (up to 50)
It allows easy colloboration across firewalls, and only one user inside the firewall is required to allow all users inside access to the mesh.
Each link is encrypted, but each message is decrypted and re-encrypted at each hop of the mesh, so you have to trust all of the nodes. It's also very hard to drop a node onc it is trusted, as each node shares public keys around to make sure all nodes have all public keys. Initial connection to the mesh requires manual key exchange. PITA, but moderatley secure.
All network traffic is encrypted, it will flood each mesh link with a minimum amount of bandwidth to foil traffic analysis.
It -is- April Fools Day in a largish chunk of the world. In fact, if you take noon as the traditional cut off for jokes, April Fools day had already finished in Australia by the time this was posted.
I'm a Unix -> OS X switcher, I can script in sh, awk, expect, etc. What advantages are there to learning AppleScript? Is the GUI integration anything like expectk?