Hydrogen burns invisibly? Really? But I seem to remember a junior high science experiment that involved determining the primary element in a gas by seeing how it reacts to a flame -- and that hydrogen would flare up when exposed to fire. Okay, so I half remember that now (it has been quite a while), and I may be describing the behavior of oxygen instead of hydrogen.
But more vividly than 8th grade science, I remember Mr Wizard's show from when I was even younger, and one of the experiments he taught showed a hydrogen filled balloon very impressively bursting into flame when touched by a [very long] burning matchstick. Are you saying that the vivid yellow of that flame came not from the burning gas, but from some other fuel, such as the latex from the balloon?
Not trying to contradict you here, you sound like you know what you're talking about, it's just that what you say contradicts what I remember being taught. Must go dig out my old college chemistry book now...:-)
Okay, I'll bite, is this just a Greek mythology reference (Cerberus?) that I'm iffy on, or is there some strong-but-obscure connection between "Hagrid" (a name I'd never heard of before the HP books), "Fluffy" (a silly diminutive name for a three headed dog-monster), and "a Greek man"?
I only found out after the first movie came out [I'd already read all the books at that point] that Nicholas Flamel, the character with the immortality potion, was based on an actual French alchemist.
I'm sure that the books are loaded with this kind of obscure, occult, &/or Anglo-Saxon reference material, but I'm too mainstream American to pick up on most of it by far. I'd love to see a good cross-referenced look at where elements from the books are drawn from pre-existing things.
As a parallel, I read & enjoyed Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, but I'm not up on enough Islamic history, Hindu history, or the history & culture of India, Pakistan, and England to pick up on more than the most blatant references. And yet, I found an "index" to the book once, and it seemed like nearly every paragraph was subtly or blatantly drawing on different source material -- it's like the book isn't so much an original piece of fiction, but a mosiac or collage assembled from found art all over the world (from the Koran to the Wizard of Oz, for example).
Just knowing this deeply enhanced my appreciation for Rushdie's book (and his other books as well), and I'd love to find a similar literary guide to Rowling's books now.
Look for books on tape, or preferably, compact disc.
Rip them to mp3.
Listen at leisure.
Courtesy of my local library, I've recently picked up copies of an Allen Ginsburg album, Bill Cosby's "Himself", a Bill Maher audiobook, Cornel West's album, a Garrison Keillor sampler, James Mason reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" & Roy Dotrice reading "The Hunting of the Snark", and the audiobook version of "Minority Report", which also includes other Phillip K Dick stories. Just to name a few. And I haven't even been looking that long, just a few weeks.
I'm hoping I can get a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show, but so far I've ony found it on tape -- which to date I haven't yet figured out how to turn into mp3s. Suggestions for that would be eagerly welcomed...:-)
If Apple did indeed gain anything by mucking about with the configurations (and it sounds like they did), who's to say that they did anything more than offset similar mucking about on the other side of the fence?
There is no saying which is right, and I don't think this guy was really trying to. If you read his writeup, he says that Apple claims a certain Dell model benchmarks at value $X, while Dell claims that the same model can do $Y.
He doesn't actually say that one or the other is correct -- he says that the most charitable thing you can do is split the difference and go with the average -- and the kicker is that even that midway point is higher than what Apple claims for the G5.
You've got a good point, but I think this guy is aware of it as much as you are. He's not saying that each vendor's analysis is authoritative, but that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and that middle ground might or might not look to be in Apple's favor (in fact, it doesn't seem to be in Apple's favor).
Waitaminute, the new CPU is going to go slower?!?! But, but, but they can't say that, can they?
Okay, you convinced me then -- when the faster-than-a-Dell model G5 comes out, and it's the most super-duper top speed computer ever -- and not to be surpassed by any rinky-dink peecee -- then I'll put down my shiny nickels.
Don't tell us -- file a bug! If you had it active before, the "bug" icon may have gone away with the 1.0 upgrade, but it can be restored, and "Repot bugs to Apple..." is still the second item under the Safari menu.
The Safari group has been responsive to bug fixes so far, and hopefully will continue to be now that the first milestone release is out of the way.
I still wish that yo ucould tab to all active page elements, not just text fields. Must go submit that one myself...
Earlier versions of Safari fell down very badly with article pages on the International Herald Tribune's site, but it looks like that's under control now. Good -- I didn't use IHT much, but they're doing some pretty tricky CSS layout stuff, and if Safari can handle their code, I'm satisfied that a lot of other sites will work pretty well too.
But anyone paying a shred of attention to the computer industry for any frame of time over the past fifty years or so would know that computers always get both faster and cheaper. The market knows that whether or not the megalomaniacal CEO spells it out for the paying conference audience or not.
The capabilities of the machines announced today are such a significant jump over what was available until now that pointing out that further improvements are on the horizon should hardly be that damaging to the sales spike that Apple must be hoping for. The people that would be scared off by a 1 year forecast are not only the ones that wouldn't have bought a new Mac until the until-now-mythical G5 came out, they're the ones that wouldn't have bought a new Mac until that G5 computer put the equivalent of a Cray monster on your desk -- i.e. the ones willing to wait a long, long time, and so really can't count as customers.
For everyone else, this can't have been much of a shocker...
Right, and the 64 bit SGI Indigo2/Impact10000 I picked up a year ago for a hundred bucks was built back in 1993 or 1994 -- that's a decade ago now. And of course others have pointed out that Alpha chips were 64 bit even earlier than that.
But as many people are saying, Apple isn't claiming that it's the first 64-bit processor, it's just the first one being marketed to a mass audience.
But then, do Intel or AMD have any 64-bit desktop machines on the market yet? I know they're in the pipeline, but if either of them is selling anything now, that would cut down Apple's hyperbole much more effectively than any decade old high end workstation...
1994: Your peecees suck so bad because they're soooo slow. Our CPU benchmarks kick your butts. We are the speed kings!
1999: So what if your peecee CPUs are faster than ours. It's not about speed, it's about quality. Speed is totally irrelevant. You're all just speed whores.
2004: Your peecees suck so bad because they're soooo slow. Our CPU benchmarks kick your butts. We are the speed kings!
2009: So what if your Apple CPUs are faster than ours. It's not about speed, it's about quality. Speed is totally irrelevant. You're all just speed whores.
-- signed, SGI, Sun, the KDE & Gnome projects, etc...
Waitaminute, the new CPU is going to get faster?!?! But, but, but they can't do that, can they?
Okay, you convinced me then -- when the 3.0ghz model comes out, and it's the most super-duper top speed ever -- and not to be surpassed -- then I'll put down my shiny nickels.
One of the transcripts I'm reading suggests that Panther will be out "by the end of the year". Does this count as a delay in the "updates in September" release cycle for OSX that we've seen so far? If so, it had better be for good reason: G5, 64-bit, etc. Nothing I've seen in the transcripts so far mentioned new hardware...
[....] As an added gotcha, when the American natives did manage to domesticate corn, there were barriers to spreading out. For instance, the people of Mexico - Aztec, Mayan, Toltec - would need to pack up and cross the American Southwestern deserts, then the great plains (which can't be farmed easily without steel plows), then the Appalachian mountains, before reaching readily farmable land in the Eastern USA. The Chinese and Middle Eastern peoples could spread all the way to Korea, India, North Africa, and Europe without hitting that much of a barrier.
So Diamond doesn't feel that the Sahara Desert was a more significant barrier than that of the American Southwest, and that the puny little Appalachains were a stronger barrier than the mighty Himalayas? That seems like an iffy conclusion to me, but then I'm sure there's more to it than that -- the book has an excellent reputation, and I've been meaning to read it for a while now. Maybe I'll check it out from the library...
Slashdot Mirror
But more vividly than 8th grade science, I remember Mr Wizard's show from when I was even younger, and one of the experiments he taught showed a hydrogen filled balloon very impressively bursting into flame when touched by a [very long] burning matchstick. Are you saying that the vivid yellow of that flame came not from the burning gas, but from some other fuel, such as the latex from the balloon?
Not trying to contradict you here, you sound like you know what you're talking about, it's just that what you say contradicts what I remember being taught. Must go dig out my old college chemistry book now... :-)
I only found out after the first movie came out [I'd already read all the books at that point] that Nicholas Flamel, the character with the immortality potion, was based on an actual French alchemist.
I'm sure that the books are loaded with this kind of obscure, occult, &/or Anglo-Saxon reference material, but I'm too mainstream American to pick up on most of it by far. I'd love to see a good cross-referenced look at where elements from the books are drawn from pre-existing things.
As a parallel, I read & enjoyed Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, but I'm not up on enough Islamic history, Hindu history, or the history & culture of India, Pakistan, and England to pick up on more than the most blatant references. And yet, I found an "index" to the book once, and it seemed like nearly every paragraph was subtly or blatantly drawing on different source material -- it's like the book isn't so much an original piece of fiction, but a mosiac or collage assembled from found art all over the world (from the Koran to the Wizard of Oz, for example).
Just knowing this deeply enhanced my appreciation for Rushdie's book (and his other books as well), and I'd love to find a similar literary guide to Rowling's books now.
Ya know, there are reasons that geeks stereotypically have a hard time attracting a mate... </hint> ;-)
How many home shopping channels are there? How many run sports all day long? You make it sound like it's not dreadful already, oy vey...
...you didn't just compare Star Trek to the Mona Fucking Lisa, did you?
Look for books on tape, or preferably, compact disc.
Rip them to mp3.
Listen at leisure.
Courtesy of my local library, I've recently picked up copies of an Allen Ginsburg album, Bill Cosby's "Himself", a Bill Maher audiobook, Cornel West's album, a Garrison Keillor sampler, James Mason reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" & Roy Dotrice reading "The Hunting of the Snark", and the audiobook version of "Minority Report", which also includes other Phillip K Dick stories. Just to name a few. And I haven't even been looking that long, just a few weeks.
I'm hoping I can get a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show, but so far I've ony found it on tape -- which to date I haven't yet figured out how to turn into mp3s. Suggestions for that would be eagerly welcomed... :-)
Why aren't people just coming out and calling it what it is: Duke Postponem Forever
Sorry, it was just a joke...
There is no saying which is right, and I don't think this guy was really trying to. If you read his writeup, he says that Apple claims a certain Dell model benchmarks at value $X, while Dell claims that the same model can do $Y.
He doesn't actually say that one or the other is correct -- he says that the most charitable thing you can do is split the difference and go with the average -- and the kicker is that even that midway point is higher than what Apple claims for the G5.
You've got a good point, but I think this guy is aware of it as much as you are. He's not saying that each vendor's analysis is authoritative, but that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and that middle ground might or might not look to be in Apple's favor (in fact, it doesn't seem to be in Apple's favor).
Okay, you convinced me then -- when the faster-than-a-Dell model G5 comes out, and it's the most super-duper top speed computer ever -- and not to be surpassed by any rinky-dink peecee -- then I'll put down my shiny nickels.
You just lost yourself a sale, Jobs!
Ok, that's my sign to turn off the browser and go to bed... :-)
The Safari group has been responsive to bug fixes so far, and hopefully will continue to be now that the first milestone release is out of the way.
I still wish that yo ucould tab to all active page elements, not just text fields. Must go submit that one myself...
Earlier versions of Safari fell down very badly with article pages on the International Herald Tribune's site, but it looks like that's under control now. Good -- I didn't use IHT much, but they're doing some pretty tricky CSS layout stuff, and if Safari can handle their code, I'm satisfied that a lot of other sites will work pretty well too.
But anyone paying a shred of attention to the computer industry for any frame of time over the past fifty years or so would know that computers always get both faster and cheaper. The market knows that whether or not the megalomaniacal CEO spells it out for the paying conference audience or not.
The capabilities of the machines announced today are such a significant jump over what was available until now that pointing out that further improvements are on the horizon should hardly be that damaging to the sales spike that Apple must be hoping for. The people that would be scared off by a 1 year forecast are not only the ones that wouldn't have bought a new Mac until the until-now-mythical G5 came out, they're the ones that wouldn't have bought a new Mac until that G5 computer put the equivalent of a Cray monster on your desk -- i.e. the ones willing to wait a long, long time, and so really can't count as customers.
For everyone else, this can't have been much of a shocker...
But as many people are saying, Apple isn't claiming that it's the first 64-bit processor, it's just the first one being marketed to a mass audience.
But then, do Intel or AMD have any 64-bit desktop machines on the market yet? I know they're in the pipeline, but if either of them is selling anything now, that would cut down Apple's hyperbole much more effectively than any decade old high end workstation...
As funny as this is, it isn't accurate -- the job has been available for several weeks now: check out the MacSlash discussion.
2009: So what if your Apple CPUs are faster than ours. It's not about speed, it's about quality. Speed is totally irrelevant. You're all just speed whores.
Okay, you convinced me then -- when the 3.0ghz model comes out, and it's the most super-duper top speed ever -- and not to be surpassed -- then I'll put down my shiny nickels.
You just lost yourself a sale, Jobs!
http://www.playerprolounge.bedesign.be/wwdc/ (probably faster if you're in Belgium, but hey... :-)
True, but will it run Panther? I doubt it... :-)
One of the transcripts I'm reading suggests that Panther will be out "by the end of the year". Does this count as a delay in the "updates in September" release cycle for OSX that we've seen so far? If so, it had better be for good reason: G5, 64-bit, etc. Nothing I've seen in the transcripts so far mentioned new hardware...
Heh, +1 Prophetic :-)
So Diamond doesn't feel that the Sahara Desert was a more significant barrier than that of the American Southwest, and that the puny little Appalachains were a stronger barrier than the mighty Himalayas? That seems like an iffy conclusion to me, but then I'm sure there's more to it than that -- the book has an excellent reputation, and I've been meaning to read it for a while now. Maybe I'll check it out from the library...
Not really -- when thinking of Microsoft cell phone companies, the first thing that comes to my mind is Sendo...