Businesses do. Except for gadget geeks, probably 80% of the Blackberrys, Treos, etc are purchased by companies for employees or by business owners
True. I actually don't know anyone who has bought a Smartphone solely for personal use. The people I know have them have either had them provided by their company, or have been reimbursed by their company for purchasing the thing.
There is another market segment in a similar boat: freelancers who use thier computers to make money, and I and some of my friends are a member of that group. I bought about $2,400 worth of computer equipment last tax year, all of which ended up being refunded to me because it's a business expense. Were I to buy an iPhone it would be the same thing: both the cost of the phone and the Cingular charges would be business expenses for me. Now, I currently don't need one of these things and have no intention of buying one. But a friend of mine, another freelancer, does need one and will probably buy it when it comes out. So, if she is any indication, expect to see a lot of these things in the movie industry, where people need all the features the iPhone has when they're on set fourteen hours a day. And, if my business life gets more complicated in the next year or so, I may have one as well.
Re:Considering their general SoftEng incompetence.
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Premiere Back on Mac
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If it were only that which pissed me off. How's about the fact that they've barely touched the graphing abilities since 5.5? And that the graphs will still corrupt if you update them more than a few times?
Re:Considering their general SoftEng incompetence.
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Premiere Back on Mac
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· Score: 1
The Gimp in particular is getting to be a fantastically credible Photoshop clone; the only thing missing really is the rich collection of plugins.
Absolutely not. Although I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe, the Gimp is nowhere near being a true Photoshop competitor, and the reason is not plug-ins. The reason are the tools Adobe have put in which make Photoshop the only tool for high-end retouching and production: the amazing-but-flawed color engine, adjustment layers (which are getting even better with CS3), the Channel Mixer and so on. Plug-ins are a non-issue: there are very few I use on a regular basis. I use the Gimp on my Linux machine, and it's good for low-end stuff. But it couldn't do half the things Photoshop does with high-end retouching, color-matching and the like.
IMO, the Adobe product most ripe for picking off is Illustrator. Adobe hasn't added anything worthwhile to it since CS (or 10, depending on who you ask) and it's getting more and more bloated.
Final Cut's competition isn't really Premiere at this point anyway, it's Avid. Most editors use one or the other depending on their training and place of employment (FCP tends to be for the self trained, small production houses etc. though that is changing, Avid for major houses and television/movie productions as it has been the standard for over a decade and many if not most pro editors- particularly those who learned to edit *gasp* film- prefer to work with it)
FCP has made huge inroads in TV production in the last few years because you can get a working editing suite for about 1/10th of what Avid will cost you. It has also become very popular among documentary makers (who usually have budgets which would be rounding errors in Hollywood features) and independent filmmakers, for the same reasons. From my own experience (YMMV, obviously) it is increasingly common for editors to be proficient on both platforms.
Full disclosure: I have installed Ubuntu Linux (first 5.40, then 6.06) on my old 500 MHz Powerbook. Ubuntu is the only Linux distro I have used. My main OS is OS X.
My experience with Ubuntu seesaws back and forth between pleasant surprise and absolute frustration. Installation was relatively painless and only a little complicated because I decided on a dual boot system. But, once I figured out I had to reformat the blank space I set aside for Ubuntu as ext3 the installer did its thing and I ended up on the Ubuntu desktop. Once I got over the turd brown color scheme and general unfamiliarity things were easy. Instead of/Users/Me it's/home/Me, but that's not a big deal. Got me a Desktop folder, so that's the same. Got/etc and all that jazz, with which I am familiar from OS X. Figure out that, as a GUI, Gnome is much more dependent on right click than OS X, so I go around right clicking on everything and find all sorts of useful options. Nautilus works pretty well, and I find a shell and fire up top to see what's going on deep down.
But it's slow. I mean the screen: redraw is slow and there's a lot of tearing, which surprises me, as I had expected the system to fly compared to OS X on six-year old hardware. I boot back into OS X and am surprised that Quartz is much faster on this machine than X/Gnome. Hmmm. . . After some googling I find out about glxgears, which runs somewhere around 40 fps. Not good. Some more Googling and a visit to Ubuntu's forums learns me that 1) the stock ati driver sucks ass and that 2) out-of-the-box video support on this machine is pretty bad, too.
So here's the frustrating part. What follows is about two weeks of googling and digging through Ubuntu's forums to find a series of solutions to make as full use of the machine's built-in card as possible (it's an 8 meg ATi Rage Mobility 128 AGP 2x). Eventually, through a combo of loading the right kernel modules and modifying xorg.conf, I am able to get direct rendering and full AGP support going, which results in a much, much faster desktop and glxgears scores of over 600 fps. But I also discover one of my big gripes with Linux: there is no centralized source for info. I found the answers my video questions in five different places. Now, the cool thing about this is that I learned some stuff, which I like. But I can't think helping that someone less inclined to root around in his machine's internals would've given up and ditched the OS. I know part of this is just a numbers problem: Apple has a very small number of machines to support using paid developers. The Linux community has a huge number of machines to support using, for the most part, people working for free and it's not surprising that some older hardware would be low on the support totem pole. But it is an annoyance.
I decide I want to be able to talk to my G5 running OS X from the Linux machine and vice versa. So, I turn on "Windows File Sharing" on the OS X machine, and share my home folder on my Powerbook. I am pleasantly surprised. Try to mount the Linux machine from the G5, but there's a problem: it's not taking the username and password. More googling reveals I have to 1) edit smb.conf and 2) set the Samba password from the shell. So, another few days of Googling and futzing are required for me to do something which can be done with three clicks in OS X. Frustration, but I eventually get it working. Yay me.
I like the Add/Remove software option, which makes finding programs a breeze. I like Update Notifier, which makes keeping the system up-to-date as easy as anything in OS X. I get comfortable with apt-get, which turns out to be pretty easy. And so I go along, merrily installing software. I find conky, which gives me a nice system monitor and practice installing software and using the shell to edit flat files, but of which are useful. I find that Ubuntu has a smaller memory footprint than OS X, which doesn't surprise me. And I dec
I think what people hate to admit is that in order to sell Linux to the masses, it's going to have to be dumbed down
Problem numero uno with Linux being as accessible as OS X or Windows is right there: "dumbed down". The idea that making an OS easy to use and install for Joe or Jane Average Computer User means sinking to a level of intelligence lower than that worthy of someone running Linux is, IMO, the main reason that Linux remains something for the geeky or curious. For the record, I use OS X as my main OS. For the record, I also run Ubuntu Linux on my old G3 laptop. My experience with Linux has been interesting: I've learned a lot of things about the OS and OSes in general. I have compiled software, hunted down dependencies, edited.conf files and tweaked xorg.conf to get direct rendering going. And, while all of these things have been fun to me because I have learned things I didn't know, none of them would have been interesting to me if I wasn't curious.
For someone who just wants their computer to be a tool, all of the things I had to do would've been a pain in the ass. And the Geek Machismo one sees on Slashdot--the idea that if you aren't willing to edit config files then you shouldn't really be using a computer--rests on twin assumptions, neither of which I believe. The first is that anyone who isn't willing to dive into the internals of their OS doesn't really deserve to use the thing. This idea, that pedantic technical knowledge implies a general superiority, isn't unique to computer geeks; I see it in audiophiles who feel that someone who buys a $199 WalMart stereo shouldn't be allowed to listen to music or foodies who think that olive oil from the supermarket renders a meal inedible. In all aspects it is wrong, elevating a narrow slice of personality above all else. It's really just a fuck you to anyone who doesn't have the knowledge.
The second assumption is that someone with superior technical knowledge will want to use it at all times, and I think it, too, is bullshit. My dad, an aerospace engineer, has been using computers longer than most people posting here have been alive. He is fluent in several computer languages and has written his own finite element analysis software. At home he uses a Dell with Windows on it and doesn't want to mess around it more than he has to, because he's at home and has better things to do. I think both of these assumptions need to be abandoned before Linux really goes mainstream.
In other words, the problem really isn't with the technology. It's with the presentation and the preconception of what people who use the computer value and want to deal with. For Linux to be really successful on the desktop some group needs to really think about marketing and catering to stupid end users who still think it's a cup holder. And, more than that, some group will need to make the decision that the people who think the CD tray is a cup holder are the most important group of computer users out there. Because it's the people who get harshed on Slashdot, the people who don't use IRC or never touch the command line, who really decide success or failure in the marketplace. Simply put, there are many, many, many more of them than there are of those who will ever compile Beryl from source.
I know I've conflated Slashdot and the Linux community somewhat, and I know that although there is some overlap they are not one in the same. My comments about geek machismo are intended more for those here whom I see exhibiting that trait. For the record, the Ubuntu community has been great and has answered a lot of my questions to the best of my ability. However, for Linux to be truly mainstream it's going to have to be "dumbed down" even more. A lot of the tweakability is going to have to be hidden away behind GUIs like the BSD stuff is in OS X. And people who gladly use AOL and think that the computer is a magic box are going to have to
If you consider OS X "fine" on a 500Mhz G3, then Windows XP should be equally "fine" on, say, a ~266Mhz P2 with 128M of RAM.
I've never run XP on that hardware. But I've run XP on a 2 GHz Athlon and had the entire GUI freeze for ten seconds at a time when switching between Illustrator and InDesign. My little G3 has never done that.
Bullshit. OS X is unbearably slow on anything sub-G4 (I have used it on Beige G3 PowerMacs and G3 iMacs, and have the bald patches to remember it by).
What's wrong with your hardware? I dual boot Linux and 10.4.8 on my old 500 MHz G3, and they both run fine. In fact, I'm amazed at how well a 6-year old machine runs Apple's latest OS. Saying that OS X is "unbearably slow" sounds like either trolling or hyperbole to me.
I hate the fact that I can never find *anything* I'm looking for. I spend entirely too long searching around for applications, their support files, and system configuration options. I realize that Apple designs these things for people who aren't familiar with computers, but fuck, it makes it hard for someone that is quite comfy with Linux and Windows configurations.
Two responses to this. The first is that I have had the same experience with Linux. I installed it on my old Powerbook for the first time and couldn't figure out a single thing. However, over the past few months I have figured out where things live, which files to edit (the constantly changing xorg.conf, for instance) and how to move around the OS. It has taken some work from my end, but I am finally comfortable in Linux. As for searching for applications in OS X, they're in/Applications, and there's a link included in every Finder window.
* I hate the fact that I have no idea what the fuck is going on behind the scenes with the Mac. Yeah, XP has gotten to this point but I guess because I have a basic idea built up over the years from other versions of Windows, I don't mind as much. Being built on Unix, I would expect to understand more about what OS X is doing -- but I don't.
top works in OS X just like in any other BSD system, and very similar to Unix systems. If you mean a more in-depth answer than that, there are any number of books and forums which can answer your questions about what's going on inside the machine.
* I really don't like the fact that I *could* do stuff on the CLI but I can never find out how. The files aren't in the locations I would expect.
See above.
It sounds to me as if you want to know how OS X works without having to be curious about the system or find out about it on your own. Like I said, I have had to spend some time googling and poking around Linux forums to become comfortable in that system, and I don't consider that to be an undue burden. If, by your own admission you're not familiar with OS X, why not get curious if you want to be interested?
The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders. ..
Reminds me why I don't read Sterling. Just because you can string a lot of images together doesn't mean you should string a lot of images together.
Can we please stop calling it "social engineering"? It's called lying. Saying 'social engineering' instead of 'lying' or 'scamming' sounds way to self-important to me, like people who ask, "would you like a beverage?" instead of "want something to drink?". If you're that socially uncomfortable, pop a couple Xanax before talking to me. Or anyone. Or leaving your house.
This rant brought to you by my cold, Adobe InDesign and my idiot clients.
My absolute favorite kind of Slashdot thread: buncha dorks pontificating on theoretical wars. Lemme dive in!
I was going to make the point above: the U.S. military is entirely dependent on fuel from the Mid-East. Any group wishing to cut the U.S. armed forces off at the knees only needs to destroy refineries/pipelines/shipping points. It is a critical point of potential failure.
The idea of air cavities has much in common with supercavitation, in which a submerged object such as a torpedo creates a single large bubble around itself. This slashes skin friction, bringing remarkable speeds within reach (New Scientist, 22 July 2000, p 26). Perhaps not surprisingly, Russian engineers who first developed supercavitating torpedoes have not only done plenty of research on air-cavity lubrication for ships, but have also put their ideas to work.
refers to: Shkval. Scared the bejesus out of the U.S. Navy.
Despite their size, black holes make a much larger dent in spacetime than planets. You can find a black hole through a number of means--their enormous gravity, the effect this has on planets, stars or gas nearby, X-ray or gamma ray bursts caused by matter falling into the black hole, gravitational lensing, etc.--all of which are relatively visible from far away. Planets, on the other hand, don't do much other than orbit stars. You can find them through their much smaller gravitational effects, or from purely optical means, but they don't have any of the drama of black holes.
but if you have a decent stereo system, the difference is obvious
Not really: see above in that most people don't care enough about the difference in quality to worry about it. Joe and Jane Average consumer are just fine with MP3s and AACs, as can be seen from the success of downloading, both legal and illegal, and from the success so far of the iTMS videos and movies I think that most people won't care enough about the quality to worry about, either.
There seems to be a threshold of quality in audio and video above which the vast majority of people are satisfied. I think the only people who worry after that are the equipment-obsessed.
As I understand, the Little Boy (gun barrel) concept is pretty straightforward if you have the material.
Yes, but no, but yes. Compared to an implosion weapon a gun weapon is simple. But that's like saying that an Apple II is simpler than a G5: try designing either one from scratch. Even with the simplicity of a gun weapon there are still huge engineering hurdles: you have to make sure the two pieces of uranium are traveling just fast enough. Too slow and you get a fizzle. Too fast and you don't get the density required for supercriticality. There are also the engineering hurdles involved in building the rest of the thing, which are serious.
It sounds to me like that probably happened in North Korea.
It's not clear what happened in North Korea, but the consensus I'm reading seems to be that the Koreans were trying some sophisticated implosion techniques which didn't work. The plutonium just "leaks" out of the low pressure points in the implosion.
It's so precise that they use hundreds of detonators, because the explosive burns to slow to create even pressure from a single detonation point, and all the wires are the same length, to avoid even minor changes in capacitance from delaying any one detonator.
It's even more complicated than that. From what can be told, U.S. warheads used a 96-point implosion. Now, however, they may use an oblong primary which requires only two detonators, one at either end. "Simple" in the way that only tens of thousands of hours of supercomputer simulation can be simple. And even the detonators are works of art.
Designing an Atomic weapons isn't that hard. Just get a bullet with appropriate fission material and shoot it at a core of enriched Uranium or for you hydrogen bomb... Get some plutonium and put it in a sphere and detonate with appropriate explosives to get it to implode.
Wrong. Designing a nuclear weapon is enormously difficult. The problem isn't the physics. The problem is the engineering. Most of the effort of the Manhattan Project was spent on engineering problems. They physics was solved by 1942, but it took three more years of work by the largest industrial economy the world had ever seen to produce two working bombs. It isn't just 'getting some plutonium in a sphere'. It's getting the plutonium to collapse in exactly the right shape in a short enough time to produce supercriticality, and then keeping that critical mass together for long enough (15 microseconds) to produce the energy you need. The engineering behind the explosive lens system itself is enormously difficult. Never mind what happens after the explosion.
The article is (obviously) light on specifics. If I had to guess from what it said, the removed info was probably specifics on 1) constructing a fissionable core 2) constructing the implosive lens system used to achieve supercriticality and 3) problems the Iraqis had doing this. Info such as this might have saved the North Koreans from having their bomb fizzle recently. There could have also been stuff in there about boosting the cores.
It's not that simple. Office is THE standard for, well, office documents. The reason I have Office 2004 on my home machine is that 99% of clients will send me documents in one of the Office formats.
He's figured out how to sell hardware that has little to no technological advantages over many of its competitors. ..
Repeat after me: Technological advantage does not sell products. Technological advantage does not sell products. Technological advantage does not sell products. Technological advantage does not sell products. ..
I'm not yelling at you, actually, but I do think it's something which should be included in every article about Apple. There is a conceit on Slashdot that the gadget with the most bells and whistles is obviously superior and deserves to dominate the market. While possibly true for technophiles, most people aren't technophiles. Most people want something they can understand which is easy to use. They don't care if it doesn't play obscure formats most have never heard about or if it plays their movie collection at full HD resolution. They want to listen to their music without much trouble and get one with their lives.
Which brings up a larger point: Most of the time the Slashdot opinion is the minority opinion.
Right now, the biggest reason to have it is camcorders
If you work in video/movie production you will use Fiewwire all the time. USB just doens't have the sustained throughput for handle video, much less HD.
USB can handle more types of devices and can handle hard drives at least 95% as well as Firewire 400
My experience doesn't hold this out. I haveen't seen USB drives benchmark more than 15 MB/s sustained. Firewire 800 can handle 70= MB/s.
Slashdot Mirror
True. I actually don't know anyone who has bought a Smartphone solely for personal use. The people I know have them have either had them provided by their company, or have been reimbursed by their company for purchasing the thing.
There is another market segment in a similar boat: freelancers who use thier computers to make money, and I and some of my friends are a member of that group. I bought about $2,400 worth of computer equipment last tax year, all of which ended up being refunded to me because it's a business expense. Were I to buy an iPhone it would be the same thing: both the cost of the phone and the Cingular charges would be business expenses for me. Now, I currently don't need one of these things and have no intention of buying one. But a friend of mine, another freelancer, does need one and will probably buy it when it comes out. So, if she is any indication, expect to see a lot of these things in the movie industry, where people need all the features the iPhone has when they're on set fourteen hours a day. And, if my business life gets more complicated in the next year or so, I may have one as well.
If it were only that which pissed me off. How's about the fact that they've barely touched the graphing abilities since 5.5? And that the graphs will still corrupt if you update them more than a few times?
Absolutely not. Although I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe, the Gimp is nowhere near being a true Photoshop competitor, and the reason is not plug-ins. The reason are the tools Adobe have put in which make Photoshop the only tool for high-end retouching and production: the amazing-but-flawed color engine, adjustment layers (which are getting even better with CS3), the Channel Mixer and so on. Plug-ins are a non-issue: there are very few I use on a regular basis. I use the Gimp on my Linux machine, and it's good for low-end stuff. But it couldn't do half the things Photoshop does with high-end retouching, color-matching and the like.
IMO, the Adobe product most ripe for picking off is Illustrator. Adobe hasn't added anything worthwhile to it since CS (or 10, depending on who you ask) and it's getting more and more bloated.
FCP has made huge inroads in TV production in the last few years because you can get a working editing suite for about 1/10th of what Avid will cost you. It has also become very popular among documentary makers (who usually have budgets which would be rounding errors in Hollywood features) and independent filmmakers, for the same reasons. From my own experience (YMMV, obviously) it is increasingly common for editors to be proficient on both platforms.
Not arguing your point. Just providing more info.
My experience with Ubuntu seesaws back and forth between pleasant surprise and absolute frustration. Installation was relatively painless and only a little complicated because I decided on a dual boot system. But, once I figured out I had to reformat the blank space I set aside for Ubuntu as ext3 the installer did its thing and I ended up on the Ubuntu desktop. Once I got over the turd brown color scheme and general unfamiliarity things were easy. Instead of /Users/Me it's /home/Me, but that's not a big deal. Got me a Desktop folder, so that's the same. Got /etc and all that jazz, with which I am familiar from OS X. Figure out that, as a GUI, Gnome is much more dependent on right click than OS X, so I go around right clicking on everything and find all sorts of useful options. Nautilus works pretty well, and I find a shell and fire up top to see what's going on deep down.
But it's slow. I mean the screen: redraw is slow and there's a lot of tearing, which surprises me, as I had expected the system to fly compared to OS X on six-year old hardware. I boot back into OS X and am surprised that Quartz is much faster on this machine than X/Gnome. Hmmm. . . After some googling I find out about glxgears, which runs somewhere around 40 fps. Not good. Some more Googling and a visit to Ubuntu's forums learns me that 1) the stock ati driver sucks ass and that 2) out-of-the-box video support on this machine is pretty bad, too.
So here's the frustrating part. What follows is about two weeks of googling and digging through Ubuntu's forums to find a series of solutions to make as full use of the machine's built-in card as possible (it's an 8 meg ATi Rage Mobility 128 AGP 2x). Eventually, through a combo of loading the right kernel modules and modifying xorg.conf, I am able to get direct rendering and full AGP support going, which results in a much, much faster desktop and glxgears scores of over 600 fps. But I also discover one of my big gripes with Linux: there is no centralized source for info. I found the answers my video questions in five different places. Now, the cool thing about this is that I learned some stuff, which I like. But I can't think helping that someone less inclined to root around in his machine's internals would've given up and ditched the OS. I know part of this is just a numbers problem: Apple has a very small number of machines to support using paid developers. The Linux community has a huge number of machines to support using, for the most part, people working for free and it's not surprising that some older hardware would be low on the support totem pole. But it is an annoyance.
I decide I want to be able to talk to my G5 running OS X from the Linux machine and vice versa. So, I turn on "Windows File Sharing" on the OS X machine, and share my home folder on my Powerbook. I am pleasantly surprised. Try to mount the Linux machine from the G5, but there's a problem: it's not taking the username and password. More googling reveals I have to 1) edit smb.conf and 2) set the Samba password from the shell. So, another few days of Googling and futzing are required for me to do something which can be done with three clicks in OS X. Frustration, but I eventually get it working. Yay me.
I like the Add/Remove software option, which makes finding programs a breeze. I like Update Notifier, which makes keeping the system up-to-date as easy as anything in OS X. I get comfortable with apt-get, which turns out to be pretty easy. And so I go along, merrily installing software. I find conky, which gives me a nice system monitor and practice installing software and using the shell to edit flat files, but of which are useful. I find that Ubuntu has a smaller memory footprint than OS X, which doesn't surprise me. And I dec
Problem numero uno with Linux being as accessible as OS X or Windows is right there: "dumbed down". The idea that making an OS easy to use and install for Joe or Jane Average Computer User means sinking to a level of intelligence lower than that worthy of someone running Linux is, IMO, the main reason that Linux remains something for the geeky or curious. For the record, I use OS X as my main OS. For the record, I also run Ubuntu Linux on my old G3 laptop. My experience with Linux has been interesting: I've learned a lot of things about the OS and OSes in general. I have compiled software, hunted down dependencies, edited .conf files and tweaked xorg.conf to get direct rendering going. And, while all of these things have been fun to me because I have learned things I didn't know, none of them would have been interesting to me if I wasn't curious.
For someone who just wants their computer to be a tool, all of the things I had to do would've been a pain in the ass. And the Geek Machismo one sees on Slashdot--the idea that if you aren't willing to edit config files then you shouldn't really be using a computer--rests on twin assumptions, neither of which I believe. The first is that anyone who isn't willing to dive into the internals of their OS doesn't really deserve to use the thing. This idea, that pedantic technical knowledge implies a general superiority, isn't unique to computer geeks; I see it in audiophiles who feel that someone who buys a $199 WalMart stereo shouldn't be allowed to listen to music or foodies who think that olive oil from the supermarket renders a meal inedible. In all aspects it is wrong, elevating a narrow slice of personality above all else. It's really just a fuck you to anyone who doesn't have the knowledge.
The second assumption is that someone with superior technical knowledge will want to use it at all times, and I think it, too, is bullshit. My dad, an aerospace engineer, has been using computers longer than most people posting here have been alive. He is fluent in several computer languages and has written his own finite element analysis software. At home he uses a Dell with Windows on it and doesn't want to mess around it more than he has to, because he's at home and has better things to do. I think both of these assumptions need to be abandoned before Linux really goes mainstream.
In other words, the problem really isn't with the technology. It's with the presentation and the preconception of what people who use the computer value and want to deal with. For Linux to be really successful on the desktop some group needs to really think about marketing and catering to stupid end users who still think it's a cup holder. And, more than that, some group will need to make the decision that the people who think the CD tray is a cup holder are the most important group of computer users out there. Because it's the people who get harshed on Slashdot, the people who don't use IRC or never touch the command line, who really decide success or failure in the marketplace. Simply put, there are many, many, many more of them than there are of those who will ever compile Beryl from source.
I know I've conflated Slashdot and the Linux community somewhat, and I know that although there is some overlap they are not one in the same. My comments about geek machismo are intended more for those here whom I see exhibiting that trait. For the record, the Ubuntu community has been great and has answered a lot of my questions to the best of my ability. However, for Linux to be truly mainstream it's going to have to be "dumbed down" even more. A lot of the tweakability is going to have to be hidden away behind GUIs like the BSD stuff is in OS X. And people who gladly use AOL and think that the computer is a magic box are going to have to
What's wrong with your hardware? I dual boot Linux and 10.4.8 on my old 500 MHz G3, and they both run fine. In fact, I'm amazed at how well a 6-year old machine runs Apple's latest OS. Saying that OS X is "unbearably slow" sounds like either trolling or hyperbole to me.
Two responses to this. The first is that I have had the same experience with Linux. I installed it on my old Powerbook for the first time and couldn't figure out a single thing. However, over the past few months I have figured out where things live, which files to edit (the constantly changing xorg.conf, for instance) and how to move around the OS. It has taken some work from my end, but I am finally comfortable in Linux. As for searching for applications in OS X, they're in /Applications, and there's a link included in every Finder window.
top works in OS X just like in any other BSD system, and very similar to Unix systems. If you mean a more in-depth answer than that, there are any number of books and forums which can answer your questions about what's going on inside the machine.
See above.
It sounds to me as if you want to know how OS X works without having to be curious about the system or find out about it on your own. Like I said, I have had to spend some time googling and poking around Linux forums to become comfortable in that system, and I don't consider that to be an undue burden. If, by your own admission you're not familiar with OS X, why not get curious if you want to be interested?
Reminds me why I don't read Sterling. Just because you can string a lot of images together doesn't mean you should string a lot of images together.
This rant brought to you by my cold, Adobe InDesign and my idiot clients.
I was going to make the point above: the U.S. military is entirely dependent on fuel from the Mid-East. Any group wishing to cut the U.S. armed forces off at the knees only needs to destroy refineries/pipelines/shipping points. It is a critical point of potential failure.
refers to: Shkval. Scared the bejesus out of the U.S. Navy.
For the record: +10, great .sig.
Despite their size, black holes make a much larger dent in spacetime than planets. You can find a black hole through a number of means--their enormous gravity, the effect this has on planets, stars or gas nearby, X-ray or gamma ray bursts caused by matter falling into the black hole, gravitational lensing, etc.--all of which are relatively visible from far away. Planets, on the other hand, don't do much other than orbit stars. You can find them through their much smaller gravitational effects, or from purely optical means, but they don't have any of the drama of black holes.
Not really: see above in that most people don't care enough about the difference in quality to worry about it. Joe and Jane Average consumer are just fine with MP3s and AACs, as can be seen from the success of downloading, both legal and illegal, and from the success so far of the iTMS videos and movies I think that most people won't care enough about the quality to worry about, either.
There seems to be a threshold of quality in audio and video above which the vast majority of people are satisfied. I think the only people who worry after that are the equipment-obsessed.
Yes, but no, but yes. Compared to an implosion weapon a gun weapon is simple. But that's like saying that an Apple II is simpler than a G5: try designing either one from scratch. Even with the simplicity of a gun weapon there are still huge engineering hurdles: you have to make sure the two pieces of uranium are traveling just fast enough. Too slow and you get a fizzle. Too fast and you don't get the density required for supercriticality. There are also the engineering hurdles involved in building the rest of the thing, which are serious.
It's not clear what happened in North Korea, but the consensus I'm reading seems to be that the Koreans were trying some sophisticated implosion techniques which didn't work. The plutonium just "leaks" out of the low pressure points in the implosion.
It's even more complicated than that. From what can be told, U.S. warheads used a 96-point implosion. Now, however, they may use an oblong primary which requires only two detonators, one at either end. "Simple" in the way that only tens of thousands of hours of supercomputer simulation can be simple. And even the detonators are works of art.
Wrong. Designing a nuclear weapon is enormously difficult. The problem isn't the physics. The problem is the engineering. Most of the effort of the Manhattan Project was spent on engineering problems. They physics was solved by 1942, but it took three more years of work by the largest industrial economy the world had ever seen to produce two working bombs. It isn't just 'getting some plutonium in a sphere'. It's getting the plutonium to collapse in exactly the right shape in a short enough time to produce supercriticality, and then keeping that critical mass together for long enough (15 microseconds) to produce the energy you need. The engineering behind the explosive lens system itself is enormously difficult. Never mind what happens after the explosion.
The article is (obviously) light on specifics. If I had to guess from what it said, the removed info was probably specifics on 1) constructing a fissionable core 2) constructing the implosive lens system used to achieve supercriticality and 3) problems the Iraqis had doing this. Info such as this might have saved the North Koreans from having their bomb fizzle recently. There could have also been stuff in there about boosting the cores.
Three if by tubes?
when there is no earth shattering kaboom.
It's not that simple. Office is THE standard for, well, office documents. The reason I have Office 2004 on my home machine is that 99% of clients will send me documents in one of the Office formats.
to have been kicked out of the Scouts.
Repeat after me: Technological advantage does not sell products. Technological advantage does not sell products. Technological advantage does not sell products. Technological advantage does not sell products. . .
I'm not yelling at you, actually, but I do think it's something which should be included in every article about Apple. There is a conceit on Slashdot that the gadget with the most bells and whistles is obviously superior and deserves to dominate the market. While possibly true for technophiles, most people aren't technophiles. Most people want something they can understand which is easy to use. They don't care if it doesn't play obscure formats most have never heard about or if it plays their movie collection at full HD resolution. They want to listen to their music without much trouble and get one with their lives.
Which brings up a larger point: Most of the time the Slashdot opinion is the minority opinion.
If you work in video/movie production you will use Fiewwire all the time. USB just doens't have the sustained throughput for handle video, much less HD.
My experience doesn't hold this out. I haveen't seen USB drives benchmark more than 15 MB/s sustained. Firewire 800 can handle 70= MB/s.