That's an impressive hack, but it's just that- a hack. I haven't owned a tape player in years, and if I can help it I never will again. It's the audio equivalent of using gigabit ethernet to go between your computer and an acoustic coupler modem.
When I look around on the subway, *everyone* has an iPod- not just nerds and not just the filthy rich, people from all walks of life, and nobody thinks it's at all unusual or "too techy for me". There's your critical mass.
Other short answer: Apple researches and develops the OS with the money they make from the hardware. If you could buy the latter without the former, Apple could not continue to do that.
Just that "20 times as profitable" figure. All that means is that the amount of the $84 that the WSJ keeps is 20 times as great as the amount of the $356.
What I suspect is going on here is that the meat of the WSJ's work, the researching and journalistic legwork, is only being counted as part of the print media division. The online division, with the 20x profit margin, consists entirely of "Take what the print division has already done and put it online". If a share of the actual reporting costs were put on the online balance sheet, its advantage would suddenly look much smaller. And if the print division disappeared overnight, the online division would shoulder the entire burden and lose that fat profit margin (and probably be unable to maintain that configuration and go out of business).
The Journal has a worldwide circulation of 2.6 million, each of whom are paying $356 a year for the privilege. 731,000 online subscribers paying $84 is not that impressive compared to that. In conclusion, online is *only* outperforming print in profit margin, not in any absolute sense, and as above online is still dependent on print anyway.
I don't see anything in TFA to indicate that Apple knew about this bug before now- he just mentions that the bug has been present with no explanation as to how this was determined. Singh even spends a good bit of text explaining how the bug is triggered by ultra-low-level routines that are not normally used by anything above the BSD layer, so I'd say there's a good chance it has never even been encountered by anyone before, if OS X's own process creation code is sufficiently solid as to never generate the inconsistency panpipes does.
You should probably put "our current knowledge of" between "most" and any of those fields of science. Statements like those have been made throughout history and sooner or later they always became false.
Actually, the density would indeed double, as density is an area measure and placing transistors atop one an other would allow you to squeeze more into a given area without shrinking them individually.
If you look beyond size and clock speed, there are lots of innovations in modern CPUs that are only present because we can put such a large number of transistors on a chip. Branch prediction, instruction reordering, etc all take up large amounts of space, and only increases in transistor density allowed them to be feasibly implemented in real-world commodity chips. Plus, there have been many advances in fabrication technology and material science made as byproducts of living up to Moore's predictions, like strained silicon or silicon-on-insulator or low-k dielectric.
Don't forget that Xcode will do parallel compiles on DP Macs. This is a huge speedup.
Also, the Objective-C++ compiler is incredibly slow, so a) this may explain the GP's problem and b) don't enable it unless you really need it. This should be improved in Tiger.
You missed the point of the example. He copied a piece of information in a manner against the wishes and directives of the copyright holder. When someone does that to the RIAA,/. cheers them on. When someone does that to the FSF,/. is furious. Pick one position and stick with it, because it's really the same issue.
Just think of them as apps that all share the same hotkey to switch to them. I look forward to binding Dashboard to one of my mouse buttons, so I don't even have to reach for it.
That's not as much of a big deal as you think- most scientific programs and even some graphics programs (like Shake) are already designed like this. It's also possible to use large pointers from GUI apps by jumping through more hoops than this "simple" solution (i.e. it's not as easy as flipping a compiler flag, but it can be done), since there's a 64-bit-aware version of Photoshop already.
This is where you're wrong. Most people have absolutely no interest in the computer on its own merits. They see it as a tool to accomplish a specific task, like "talk to friends" or "check stock prices" or "read news". They won't "practice" with the computer because they see no reason to try to do things with it that they didn't already want to do.
The current system is a house of cards. Remember a few months back when a bum broke two major subway lines with a single track fire? I agree about the conductors, but the subway still has major problems and does need a major upgrade.
Even the great controller mistake was largely corrected
Speak for yourself. A large number of people, myself included, found the large controllers quite comfortable and don't look forward to being forced to adapt to an S.
(No, I do not have freakishly large hands- I have no problems with the Gamecube controller either. But please, Microsoft, don't fix what isn't broken. I really hope the Xbox 2's controller ports are backwards-compatible, or at least that a third party clones the original for XB2...)
Until you can precisely define and quantify elegance, that's not a useful rule (for one thing, "elegant" does not always mean "small"). What makes you think the modern proof is any larger than Fermat's would have been? Maybe the "proof the margin was too small to contain" was an extremely simplified outline that would have had to be expanded to something equivalent to the modern proof before it was sound.
Carol Moseley Braun said "Fear is the mind-killer" when she appeared on the Daily Show (and not as a staged joke either, she just said it casually while answering a serious question).
The Right Thing to do here is for Google to extend.htaccess or robots.txt to allow the site author to specify whether a URL should be prefetched. Doing it at the server config or client level is just silly.
It disappears; the system is completely halted. You only continue to see the screen image because the video hardware continues to read the contents of VRAM and send it out the display port.
Peripherals that use hardware passthroughs can have amusing responses to a system crash... When an old machine that had a TV card froze up, the video and audio would continue playing (the video was put onscreen as a hardware overlay on a key color, and the audio was handled by the PCI card). The audio would continue to play as the system rebooted, only stopping when the computer got around to loading the TV card's driver which reinitialized the hardware.
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That's an impressive hack, but it's just that- a hack. I haven't owned a tape player in years, and if I can help it I never will again. It's the audio equivalent of using gigabit ethernet to go between your computer and an acoustic coupler modem.
When I look around on the subway, *everyone* has an iPod- not just nerds and not just the filthy rich, people from all walks of life, and nobody thinks it's at all unusual or "too techy for me". There's your critical mass.
SP2 didn't even come with the firewall. All it did was make it on by default and rearranged the GUI for it.
Other short answer: Apple researches and develops the OS with the money they make from the hardware. If you could buy the latter without the former, Apple could not continue to do that.
Just that "20 times as profitable" figure. All that means is that the amount of the $84 that the WSJ keeps is 20 times as great as the amount of the $356.
What I suspect is going on here is that the meat of the WSJ's work, the researching and journalistic legwork, is only being counted as part of the print media division. The online division, with the 20x profit margin, consists entirely of "Take what the print division has already done and put it online". If a share of the actual reporting costs were put on the online balance sheet, its advantage would suddenly look much smaller. And if the print division disappeared overnight, the online division would shoulder the entire burden and lose that fat profit margin (and probably be unable to maintain that configuration and go out of business).
The Journal has a worldwide circulation of 2.6 million, each of whom are paying $356 a year for the privilege. 731,000 online subscribers paying $84 is not that impressive compared to that. In conclusion, online is *only* outperforming print in profit margin, not in any absolute sense, and as above online is still dependent on print anyway.
I don't see anything in TFA to indicate that Apple knew about this bug before now- he just mentions that the bug has been present with no explanation as to how this was determined. Singh even spends a good bit of text explaining how the bug is triggered by ultra-low-level routines that are not normally used by anything above the BSD layer, so I'd say there's a good chance it has never even been encountered by anyone before, if OS X's own process creation code is sufficiently solid as to never generate the inconsistency panpipes does.
You should probably put "our current knowledge of" between "most" and any of those fields of science. Statements like those have been made throughout history and sooner or later they always became false.
And it'll be twice as dead every 18 months.
Actually, the density would indeed double, as density is an area measure and placing transistors atop one an other would allow you to squeeze more into a given area without shrinking them individually.
If you look beyond size and clock speed, there are lots of innovations in modern CPUs that are only present because we can put such a large number of transistors on a chip. Branch prediction, instruction reordering, etc all take up large amounts of space, and only increases in transistor density allowed them to be feasibly implemented in real-world commodity chips. Plus, there have been many advances in fabrication technology and material science made as byproducts of living up to Moore's predictions, like strained silicon or silicon-on-insulator or low-k dielectric.
Don't forget that Xcode will do parallel compiles on DP Macs. This is a huge speedup.
Also, the Objective-C++ compiler is incredibly slow, so a) this may explain the GP's problem and b) don't enable it unless you really need it. This should be improved in Tiger.
You missed the point of the example. He copied a piece of information in a manner against the wishes and directives of the copyright holder. When someone does that to the RIAA, /. cheers them on. When someone does that to the FSF, /. is furious. Pick one position and stick with it, because it's really the same issue.
Just think of them as apps that all share the same hotkey to switch to them. I look forward to binding Dashboard to one of my mouse buttons, so I don't even have to reach for it.
That's not as much of a big deal as you think- most scientific programs and even some graphics programs (like Shake) are already designed like this. It's also possible to use large pointers from GUI apps by jumping through more hoops than this "simple" solution (i.e. it's not as easy as flipping a compiler flag, but it can be done), since there's a 64-bit-aware version of Photoshop already.
I assume most people do.
This is where you're wrong. Most people have absolutely no interest in the computer on its own merits. They see it as a tool to accomplish a specific task, like "talk to friends" or "check stock prices" or "read news". They won't "practice" with the computer because they see no reason to try to do things with it that they didn't already want to do.
The current system is a house of cards. Remember a few months back when a bum broke two major subway lines with a single track fire? I agree about the conductors, but the subway still has major problems and does need a major upgrade.
Don't forget "Xenon".
Where do you think the money to make good new shows comes from? Reality shows are cash cows.
Don't worry- most of the population of /. is very unlikely to reproduce.
You can't do live video over BitTorrent, since it does not provide in-order delivery.
Even the great controller mistake was largely corrected
Speak for yourself. A large number of people, myself included, found the large controllers quite comfortable and don't look forward to being forced to adapt to an S.
(No, I do not have freakishly large hands- I have no problems with the Gamecube controller either. But please, Microsoft, don't fix what isn't broken. I really hope the Xbox 2's controller ports are backwards-compatible, or at least that a third party clones the original for XB2...)
Until you can precisely define and quantify elegance, that's not a useful rule (for one thing, "elegant" does not always mean "small"). What makes you think the modern proof is any larger than Fermat's would have been? Maybe the "proof the margin was too small to contain" was an extremely simplified outline that would have had to be expanded to something equivalent to the modern proof before it was sound.
Those shows are aimed at young children. All the "real" shows are on Toonami (saturday evening) and Adult Swim (every night except Friday).
Carol Moseley Braun said "Fear is the mind-killer" when she appeared on the Daily Show (and not as a staged joke either, she just said it casually while answering a serious question).
The Right Thing to do here is for Google to extend .htaccess or robots.txt to allow the site author to specify whether a URL should be prefetched. Doing it at the server config or client level is just silly.
It disappears; the system is completely halted. You only continue to see the screen image because the video hardware continues to read the contents of VRAM and send it out the display port.
Peripherals that use hardware passthroughs can have amusing responses to a system crash... When an old machine that had a TV card froze up, the video and audio would continue playing (the video was put onscreen as a hardware overlay on a key color, and the audio was handled by the PCI card). The audio would continue to play as the system rebooted, only stopping when the computer got around to loading the TV card's driver which reinitialized the hardware.