I just find it ironic that Apple could very well be going back to RISC after not even a decade of being on x86. Even more ironic given the amount of work Apple contributed with Acorn back in the 1980's.
A MacBook with ARM chip wouldn't surprise me. After all the iPad, iPhone, and iPod are all arm chips already.
But then again I bought this MBP earlier this year as well as parallels and Windows 7 Pro because I do enough development work on multiple platforms that i do need to test against windows as well as use Visual Studio now and then. And this gives the flexibility to stay in Unix 90% of the time and then boot bootcamp using either parallels or even reboot directly into Windows 7 if I need to do some heavy work in VS.
Apple's getting out of the desktop business. They may keep the iMac line for a while longer, but everyone I know in video production for 3D and major post production are off Apple and have either gone to windows 7 or Linux depending on their particular software preference.
Now, ironically, most of the videographers I know in small shops are all still Apple or gone to Apple, but not on the desktop. They are all using 15" or 17" Mac Book Pros and some do have 27" iMacs. Mostly, though, that's because with an external thunderbolt drive they can now work from anywhere. If they are shooting a documentary or commercial or wedding or what not, they can start to do editing right there in the hotel that night. No need to drag 50lbs of equipment to do editing anymore.
I mean hell, I have 16GB of Ram in my MacBook Pro. It has both an ATi 6770m and the Intel HD3000 graphics and switches based on what I'm doing. If I'm playing a game it's using the ATi. If I'm watching netflix it's usually the HD3000.
When google bought doubleclick then admobi who was left as a major player in the online ads market? Especially since Google has a massive amount of data on you from all your searches, email, documents, and other services you may use from them or others use via them (analytics anyone?).
iAds competes, but only on iOS. Facebook has ads, but it's only on facebook. If I want to do online advertising for a widget or a branding campaign using online ads on a non-specific platform, there's pretty much google.
Even though they are 150k each, you can buy 10-20 for the price of 1 helicopter. Not to mention cheaper operations and easier to train a drone pilot than a real one.
I know WebSQL got scrubbed from the HTML5 spec a couple years ago, but during that time it got adopted in a usable way by webkit and opera. In the spec or not it's become the defacto standard for anyone doing HTML5 development for mobile devices, especially for use in off-line apps. Not only that, but at this point it's proven and reliable. I have a feeling it's going to be like H.264 vs WebM. The technical gurus will support one over the other due to ideological reasons, meanwhile the rest of us who are being paid to write things that work will continue going on using what works for us and our clients.
Right now WebSQL is supported on basically 99% of the mobile devices we see in our clients' hands. That includes iOS, Android, Blackberry, hell even Kindle and Nook. On the desktop it works on Safari, Chrome, and hell even FireFox with an extension.
Back when I was in college 10 - 12 years ago the internet was this thing that would never be tamed. It was the wild west of free expression that could never be taken away. Censorship would be automatically routed around and all was good. That was a common belief by many here and in academia. I had one professor, philosophy professor with an undergrad in comp sci from Berkeley back in the 70's and a masters in math, who thought it very differently. He felt by 2020 the beast would be tamed, the powers that be would find ways to regulate it and bring it back under their control. The genie, he insisted, would indeed be put in the bottle. Not only that, but it would be come the tool of easy mass surveillance and that the internet would be the end of privacy as we knew it. I didn't want to believe him either, but a decade later here we are. And it seems like he was more right than wrong.
When China erected its Great Firewall it proved the internet could indeed be censored. Is it perfect, no, but it doesn't have to be. Just good enough. Soon a lot of countries were doing it.
Now, if (and I stress if) Iran can create their own internal network and succeeds then it is the end of the "internet" as we know it. The world wide web will be Balkanized so that content can be better regulated by local regimes.
I understand the point of the F-22 and F-35 was to keep Lockheed's engineers busy while drone technology was perfected. That's how the defense industry works. Lockheed got the next gen manned fighter program, Boeing got the missile defense and some of the drone work, northrop is getting some of the drone work, that's just how it works.
It still would have made a lot more sense and been far cheaper to have just produced a new upgraded block of F-15's to replace those with too many flight hours and we wouldn't have lost any capabilities, they'd been in service 10 years ago, and probably could have built 3 for the cost of an F-22 or F-35. Not to mention already had the service and support tools in place as probably much of the gear would have remained the same. I'm sure the new F-15's would have been around the $50M a piece range (maybe $60 - 65M in todays dollars), but that's a lot cheaper than the limited number of F-22.
This is what the navy did with the F/A-18 Super Hornet. R&D was about $200M and even came in on time and under budget. It shared a lot of the same support tooling as the older F/A-18 C/D models, which is important on a ship with limited space.
Actually, the DOD swooped in and bought the iridium network at the 11th hour right before the sats were to be given the command to thrust and burn up in the atmosphere. And they bought the entire network for pennies of what it cost to launch the birds in the first place (or what it would cost to launch their own similar network)
My understanding it was purchased primarily for non-secure military communications i.e. soldiers half a world away getting to call or video conference back home.
I don't know if the headline was here or in our local news site, but about a year ago the headlines was that a department was removing their redlight cams because "people stopped running the lights." If this was really about safety the department et. al. would have been praising at look how effective this tool was at improving public safety.
But that wasn't the headline or just of the article, it was "We are so disappointed because this traffic light cameras aren't making us money anymore, wo is us because now we must find a way to generate more revenue!"
I was flipping through the channels a couple nights ago and came across a Piers Morgan Tonight show (there was a guest host) with three or four women on the panel and they happen to be discussing airport security. And 3 of the 4 of them outright said, "But this is what is required to keep us safe, therefore I full support having to take my shoes off etc.."
I sat there a bit taken back realizing that probably this really is the view that most people probably hold. I'm not sure why I expected any different.
After 9/11 there were things done that made sense: i.e. armored cockpit doors. Having to stow sharp pointed objects in checked luggage, okay I can accept that as well. But almost everything else is just theatre, just as George Carlin pointed out BEFORE 9/11 about bombs on airplanes.
Furthermore everything changed for any would be hijackers after 9/11 as well, because now passengers know that sitting and doing nothing will no longer increase their chances for survival: better to go down fighting. Look at the incidents since 9/11 on planes, pretty much all of them have been stopped by OTHER PASSENGERS ON THE PLANE.
I don't think they're wrong. I own about 500 acres of farmland that I rent out and this is something I've been watching the past couple years and something that a lot of the ag people have been warning about is the fact even the United States as of right now has less than a 90 day carry over (seems like I read something the other day that the supply had now dropped to something like 60 days). The carry over was 18 months in the 1950's. Frankly I find that a little scary.
That means that if there is a major disruption somewhere in the supply chain(oil supplies disrupted), another summer or two like this past one, or some major event like a large volcanic eruption on the scale of Krakatoa with global weather impact and the United States is 3 months away from having no food. This isn't the price becomes too high for people to afford, this is literally THERE IS NO FOOD. The physical supply doesn't exist. And that's kind of scary.
Let's just take this past summer. The United States produces roughly 40% of the world's corn. We'll be lucky to produce half that due to the weather this summer. That means globally about 20% of the global supply of corn this year is gone, it doesn't exist this year. Furthermore drought in Russia, Europe, and Australia means they aren't having bumper crops to offset that loss.
Short term that means people will likely turn to rice to replace corn as their staple. Rice prices aren't much changed from a year ago. (We raise Rice and Soybeans so that's what I primarily pay attention to). Soybean prices on the other hand are the highest I've seen it in my lifetime. And I remember early in the summer the commodity traders were assuming a near perfect yield this year in the prices of corn and soybeans, et. al. and that was *before* the drought. (I know, why those idiots were assuming that in the first place is another discussion)
What has surprised me is how little this gets reported in the main stream press. The only reason I know anything about it is the fact I own farms and read some of the ag publications so I have some idea of what is going on in that world.
And then complaining when said API disappears? For the US at least NOAA offers a pretty nice REST/XML API that's free and even comes with icons you can link to if building a webpage or app.
Actually that just makes it easier to target him with a drone strike. Then the US can say, "We were targeting taliban mid level guy X. Killing one of the founders of the pirate bay, he was just collateral damage."
This is the reason I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro. I went to mac 10 years ago. That was during their "switcher" campaign. Fact was all the people I know who "switched" went from Linux to Mac, not windows. It was only after the switch to Intel and the release of the iDevices that a lot of my non-tech friends went mac.
But the main reason why I went to mac was I wanted a *iux that worked. And trying to get Linux to work with laptop hardware back at that time was nearly impossible. Sure it may run, but the sound card wouldn't work, or you'd have to use a PCIMA network adaptor because the one built in didn't have a driver.
I got tired of futzing with it and saw that OSX had my Unix development envrioment plus I could get Office, Macromedia software, and Adobe software (which was important to my work at that time). More over it all just worked. No more editing make files and recompiling code to get something to work.
I always here the complaints that Macs are more expensive upfront. True, but I think of the time I've saved over the past 10 years NOT having to fool around with my machine I'd say it's far outweighed the few hundred dollars more I spent.
Hell I bought my Dad an iMac 6 years ago (ironically HDD just started going bad and he bought a new iMac Yesterday). It used to be anytime I'd go home to visit for a holiday I always seemed to spend 2 - 3 hours "fixing" the windows box he had before it. That usually totaled 10 - 12 hours a year. In the 6 years he had the machine I spent a grand total of 4 hours and that was upgrading the various OS iterations.
We were also early adopters and one of the first to really connect people in our country with electricity and phone lines. Also we weren't bombed out twice last century and as such we have a lot of legacy infrastructure at this point. My grandmother didn't have a private line until the early 1990's. It was still party lines and rotary phones in that part of the country.
You need to fly into Kansas City, rent a car and then drive to Denver sometime. It would give you a clearer perspective on just how much bigger things can be over here.
They are in a left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing with fingers in so many pies. All they saw with the derivatives were double digit return rates quarter after quarter until the house of cards fell. So long as the profits were rolling in, they didn't stop to ask any questions.
10 - 15 years ago I remember professors and others ranting and raving that the internet would usher in a new era of free flow of ideas around the world and because of the way the internet was designed it could not be filtered or stopped. Which given the cost of computing at the time seemed reasonable.
But by 2002 that had all changed. I remember taking a class which the professor had been teach philosophy and computers for close to 20 years at that point. He went into the theory behind "hyper linked text" and the idea and concept of what the "world wide web" originally meant to people like him. The closest thing we have to their philosophical idea today is wikipedia where you can go read an page with links to other pages about related topics/events/etc..
By that time "surfing the web" was not a web of interlinked hypertext, but was a rather linear experience. The research at the time showed this was how most peopl thought and used the web and was reflected in general web site design espcially of corporate sites and news sites. Fast forward 10 years later and now we have apps on our phones. Many of those apps rely on the underlying protocols of the internet, but most take you to a single site or service.
Back to the original point though was this idea that all information wanted to be free and would be free. To the academics the genie was out of the bottle and would never be put back in. My professor thought otherwise and that we'd see a slow march towards fragmenation as the powers that be learned to tame the beast.
Then came China who seemed to do it with the great firewall. Are the chinese 100% effective? No. But you don't have to be 100% just effective enough. Once they did it and proved it could be done other countries started erecting national filters, firewalls, and monitoring equipment.
Now China has something the Iranians do not: a billion people. That is a critical mass for a user base and something Iran doesn't have. But, if the Iranians do prove it can be done effectively, and there will be a lot of other countries watching, then it's likely we'll see the end of the internet as we know it over the next 10 - 15 years as more countries and groups will create their own private networks which they can control.
And meanwhile the after action reports from the conflicts fought in the last 25 years have all said the same thing: need more A-10's and B-52's.
It still seems to me that the best course of action would have been to invest a little in an update of the F-15 20 years ago and kept it in production a little longer similiar to what the Navy did with the F-18 Super Hornet. (I think R&D for that was around $200M).
The only problem with the F-15's is not that it's being out classed even today as it is the number of flight hours on the existing airframes.
And Civ V is available from the apple app store. That's where I bought it from. I'm sure that is what steam is really fearing, that a microsoft run app store for windows will make thier platform largely obsolete for most users...
Slashdot Mirror
had to be said.
I just find it ironic that Apple could very well be going back to RISC after not even a decade of being on x86. Even more ironic given the amount of work Apple contributed with Acorn back in the 1980's.
A MacBook with ARM chip wouldn't surprise me. After all the iPad, iPhone, and iPod are all arm chips already.
But then again I bought this MBP earlier this year as well as parallels and Windows 7 Pro because I do enough development work on multiple platforms that i do need to test against windows as well as use Visual Studio now and then. And this gives the flexibility to stay in Unix 90% of the time and then boot bootcamp using either parallels or even reboot directly into Windows 7 if I need to do some heavy work in VS.
Apple's getting out of the desktop business. They may keep the iMac line for a while longer, but everyone I know in video production for 3D and major post production are off Apple and have either gone to windows 7 or Linux depending on their particular software preference.
Now, ironically, most of the videographers I know in small shops are all still Apple or gone to Apple, but not on the desktop. They are all using 15" or 17" Mac Book Pros and some do have 27" iMacs. Mostly, though, that's because with an external thunderbolt drive they can now work from anywhere. If they are shooting a documentary or commercial or wedding or what not, they can start to do editing right there in the hotel that night. No need to drag 50lbs of equipment to do editing anymore.
I mean hell, I have 16GB of Ram in my MacBook Pro. It has both an ATi 6770m and the Intel HD3000 graphics and switches based on what I'm doing. If I'm playing a game it's using the ATi. If I'm watching netflix it's usually the HD3000.
When google bought doubleclick then admobi who was left as a major player in the online ads market? Especially since Google has a massive amount of data on you from all your searches, email, documents, and other services you may use from them or others use via them (analytics anyone?).
iAds competes, but only on iOS. Facebook has ads, but it's only on facebook. If I want to do online advertising for a widget or a branding campaign using online ads on a non-specific platform, there's pretty much google.
Even though they are 150k each, you can buy 10-20 for the price of 1 helicopter. Not to mention cheaper operations and easier to train a drone pilot than a real one.
I know WebSQL got scrubbed from the HTML5 spec a couple years ago, but during that time it got adopted in a usable way by webkit and opera. In the spec or not it's become the defacto standard for anyone doing HTML5 development for mobile devices, especially for use in off-line apps. Not only that, but at this point it's proven and reliable. I have a feeling it's going to be like H.264 vs WebM. The technical gurus will support one over the other due to ideological reasons, meanwhile the rest of us who are being paid to write things that work will continue going on using what works for us and our clients.
Right now WebSQL is supported on basically 99% of the mobile devices we see in our clients' hands. That includes iOS, Android, Blackberry, hell even Kindle and Nook. On the desktop it works on Safari, Chrome, and hell even FireFox with an extension.
Back when I was in college 10 - 12 years ago the internet was this thing that would never be tamed. It was the wild west of free expression that could never be taken away. Censorship would be automatically routed around and all was good. That was a common belief by many here and in academia. I had one professor, philosophy professor with an undergrad in comp sci from Berkeley back in the 70's and a masters in math, who thought it very differently. He felt by 2020 the beast would be tamed, the powers that be would find ways to regulate it and bring it back under their control. The genie, he insisted, would indeed be put in the bottle. Not only that, but it would be come the tool of easy mass surveillance and that the internet would be the end of privacy as we knew it. I didn't want to believe him either, but a decade later here we are. And it seems like he was more right than wrong.
When China erected its Great Firewall it proved the internet could indeed be censored. Is it perfect, no, but it doesn't have to be. Just good enough. Soon a lot of countries were doing it.
Now, if (and I stress if) Iran can create their own internal network and succeeds then it is the end of the "internet" as we know it. The world wide web will be Balkanized so that content can be better regulated by local regimes.
I understand the point of the F-22 and F-35 was to keep Lockheed's engineers busy while drone technology was perfected. That's how the defense industry works. Lockheed got the next gen manned fighter program, Boeing got the missile defense and some of the drone work, northrop is getting some of the drone work, that's just how it works.
It still would have made a lot more sense and been far cheaper to have just produced a new upgraded block of F-15's to replace those with too many flight hours and we wouldn't have lost any capabilities, they'd been in service 10 years ago, and probably could have built 3 for the cost of an F-22 or F-35. Not to mention already had the service and support tools in place as probably much of the gear would have remained the same. I'm sure the new F-15's would have been around the $50M a piece range (maybe $60 - 65M in todays dollars), but that's a lot cheaper than the limited number of F-22.
This is what the navy did with the F/A-18 Super Hornet. R&D was about $200M and even came in on time and under budget. It shared a lot of the same support tooling as the older F/A-18 C/D models, which is important on a ship with limited space.
Actually, the DOD swooped in and bought the iridium network at the 11th hour right before the sats were to be given the command to thrust and burn up in the atmosphere. And they bought the entire network for pennies of what it cost to launch the birds in the first place (or what it would cost to launch their own similar network)
My understanding it was purchased primarily for non-secure military communications i.e. soldiers half a world away getting to call or video conference back home.
I don't know if the headline was here or in our local news site, but about a year ago the headlines was that a department was removing their redlight cams because "people stopped running the lights." If this was really about safety the department et. al. would have been praising at look how effective this tool was at improving public safety.
But that wasn't the headline or just of the article, it was "We are so disappointed because this traffic light cameras aren't making us money anymore, wo is us because now we must find a way to generate more revenue!"
Projects I honestly thought would ever see release. It's been a good past 10 days or so for fan made games.
If it was good enough for Christopher Columbus it's good enough for you!
I was flipping through the channels a couple nights ago and came across a Piers Morgan Tonight show (there was a guest host) with three or four women on the panel and they happen to be discussing airport security. And 3 of the 4 of them outright said, "But this is what is required to keep us safe, therefore I full support having to take my shoes off etc.."
I sat there a bit taken back realizing that probably this really is the view that most people probably hold. I'm not sure why I expected any different.
After 9/11 there were things done that made sense: i.e. armored cockpit doors. Having to stow sharp pointed objects in checked luggage, okay I can accept that as well. But almost everything else is just theatre, just as George Carlin pointed out BEFORE 9/11 about bombs on airplanes.
Furthermore everything changed for any would be hijackers after 9/11 as well, because now passengers know that sitting and doing nothing will no longer increase their chances for survival: better to go down fighting. Look at the incidents since 9/11 on planes, pretty much all of them have been stopped by OTHER PASSENGERS ON THE PLANE.
I don't think they're wrong. I own about 500 acres of farmland that I rent out and this is something I've been watching the past couple years and something that a lot of the ag people have been warning about is the fact even the United States as of right now has less than a 90 day carry over (seems like I read something the other day that the supply had now dropped to something like 60 days). The carry over was 18 months in the 1950's. Frankly I find that a little scary.
That means that if there is a major disruption somewhere in the supply chain(oil supplies disrupted), another summer or two like this past one, or some major event like a large volcanic eruption on the scale of Krakatoa with global weather impact and the United States is 3 months away from having no food. This isn't the price becomes too high for people to afford, this is literally THERE IS NO FOOD. The physical supply doesn't exist. And that's kind of scary.
Let's just take this past summer. The United States produces roughly 40% of the world's corn. We'll be lucky to produce half that due to the weather this summer. That means globally about 20% of the global supply of corn this year is gone, it doesn't exist this year. Furthermore drought in Russia, Europe, and Australia means they aren't having bumper crops to offset that loss.
Short term that means people will likely turn to rice to replace corn as their staple. Rice prices aren't much changed from a year ago. (We raise Rice and Soybeans so that's what I primarily pay attention to). Soybean prices on the other hand are the highest I've seen it in my lifetime. And I remember early in the summer the commodity traders were assuming a near perfect yield this year in the prices of corn and soybeans, et. al. and that was *before* the drought. (I know, why those idiots were assuming that in the first place is another discussion)
What has surprised me is how little this gets reported in the main stream press. The only reason I know anything about it is the fact I own farms and read some of the ag publications so I have some idea of what is going on in that world.
And then complaining when said API disappears? For the US at least NOAA offers a pretty nice REST/XML API that's free and even comes with icons you can link to if building a webpage or app.
Actually that just makes it easier to target him with a drone strike. Then the US can say, "We were targeting taliban mid level guy X. Killing one of the founders of the pirate bay, he was just collateral damage."
This is the reason I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro. I went to mac 10 years ago. That was during their "switcher" campaign. Fact was all the people I know who "switched" went from Linux to Mac, not windows. It was only after the switch to Intel and the release of the iDevices that a lot of my non-tech friends went mac.
But the main reason why I went to mac was I wanted a *iux that worked. And trying to get Linux to work with laptop hardware back at that time was nearly impossible. Sure it may run, but the sound card wouldn't work, or you'd have to use a PCIMA network adaptor because the one built in didn't have a driver.
I got tired of futzing with it and saw that OSX had my Unix development envrioment plus I could get Office, Macromedia software, and Adobe software (which was important to my work at that time). More over it all just worked. No more editing make files and recompiling code to get something to work.
I always here the complaints that Macs are more expensive upfront. True, but I think of the time I've saved over the past 10 years NOT having to fool around with my machine I'd say it's far outweighed the few hundred dollars more I spent.
Hell I bought my Dad an iMac 6 years ago (ironically HDD just started going bad and he bought a new iMac Yesterday). It used to be anytime I'd go home to visit for a holiday I always seemed to spend 2 - 3 hours "fixing" the windows box he had before it. That usually totaled 10 - 12 hours a year. In the 6 years he had the machine I spent a grand total of 4 hours and that was upgrading the various OS iterations.
And Cryptic is now owned by Perfect World....
We were also early adopters and one of the first to really connect people in our country with electricity and phone lines. Also we weren't bombed out twice last century and as such we have a lot of legacy infrastructure at this point. My grandmother didn't have a private line until the early 1990's. It was still party lines and rotary phones in that part of the country.
You need to fly into Kansas City, rent a car and then drive to Denver sometime. It would give you a clearer perspective on just how much bigger things can be over here.
They are in a left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing with fingers in so many pies. All they saw with the derivatives were double digit return rates quarter after quarter until the house of cards fell. So long as the profits were rolling in, they didn't stop to ask any questions.
We'll continue to burn lots and lots of coal for the foreseeable future.
10 - 15 years ago I remember professors and others ranting and raving that the internet would usher in a new era of free flow of ideas around the world and because of the way the internet was designed it could not be filtered or stopped. Which given the cost of computing at the time seemed reasonable.
But by 2002 that had all changed. I remember taking a class which the professor had been teach philosophy and computers for close to 20 years at that point. He went into the theory behind "hyper linked text" and the idea and concept of what the "world wide web" originally meant to people like him. The closest thing we have to their philosophical idea today is wikipedia where you can go read an page with links to other pages about related topics/events/etc..
By that time "surfing the web" was not a web of interlinked hypertext, but was a rather linear experience. The research at the time showed this was how most peopl thought and used the web and was reflected in general web site design espcially of corporate sites and news sites. Fast forward 10 years later and now we have apps on our phones. Many of those apps rely on the underlying protocols of the internet, but most take you to a single site or service.
Back to the original point though was this idea that all information wanted to be free and would be free. To the academics the genie was out of the bottle and would never be put back in. My professor thought otherwise and that we'd see a slow march towards fragmenation as the powers that be learned to tame the beast.
Then came China who seemed to do it with the great firewall. Are the chinese 100% effective? No. But you don't have to be 100% just effective enough. Once they did it and proved it could be done other countries started erecting national filters, firewalls, and monitoring equipment.
Now China has something the Iranians do not: a billion people. That is a critical mass for a user base and something Iran doesn't have. But, if the Iranians do prove it can be done effectively, and there will be a lot of other countries watching, then it's likely we'll see the end of the internet as we know it over the next 10 - 15 years as more countries and groups will create their own private networks which they can control.
And meanwhile the after action reports from the conflicts fought in the last 25 years have all said the same thing: need more A-10's and B-52's.
It still seems to me that the best course of action would have been to invest a little in an update of the F-15 20 years ago and kept it in production a little longer similiar to what the Navy did with the F-18 Super Hornet. (I think R&D for that was around $200M).
The only problem with the F-15's is not that it's being out classed even today as it is the number of flight hours on the existing airframes.
And Civ V is available from the apple app store. That's where I bought it from. I'm sure that is what steam is really fearing, that a microsoft run app store for windows will make thier platform largely obsolete for most users...