Government regulations have lowered the death rate in many industries and on the roads over the years. So your claim that decisions made by people you don't know never turns out for the best is very obviously completely wrong.
Some decisions people you don't know turn out the worse for you. Some turn out the best for you. And that's no different from decisions people make for themselves. For example many people decide to smoke - that's a decision that invariably turns out for the worse.
It sure is. That's why I used it as the comparison. It's the kettle on during the commercial break of a popular show is the hardest spike the grid has to deal with. And they cope with that alright. They have people who's job it is to predict it. Spikes from charging electric cars will be both less severe and easier to predict.
Methinks you need find out the differences between torque, power and energy.
My post was about power, because that's what the post before was about.
Torque and energy are neither the same thing as power, nor the same thing as each other. You can't compare them. So no I don't need to check my math. You just need to stop posting about things you don't understand.
Launchpad makes little sense with indirect pointing
I find Launchpad makes a lot of sense. So much so that I've removed the Applications folder from my dock now. Thing is if you try to arrange the Applications folder into some sort of structure, with sub-directories for certain groups of apps, or pull certain apps out of sub-folders into the main Applications folder, you can run into problems when you have an auto update, or install a new version. You can end up with two different versions of the app in different places.
Launchpad enables you to create logical groupings by page and by folder, without changing the physical location of the app on disk.
It also provides a bigger canvas on which the apps are laid out, such that you don't have to scroll to find an app.
It's the they are presenting it as a better way to interface with your computer.
For sure they are selling the benefits of the new feature, as they would with any new feature. But I don't see anywhere where they are saying it's a "better way" than windowed mode.
Certainly it draws inspiration from iOS. The strap line for Lion from the day it was first announced was "Back to the Mac", whose primary meaning was to take some appropriate ideas from iOS and implement them in OSX.
But again that doesn't mean they are working towards merging the two OSs.
You're overstating the case with "resisting". Apple Apps have long used the full screen where appropriate: Quicktime, iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture etc. And as for Apple being consistent with it's own Human Interface Guidelines - that was never true. Apple always pioneered with the actual design of it's apps, with the HIG maybe getting updated later to reflect the new reality.
Unifying the OSX UI and the iOS UI simply isn't going to happen. Anyone with a feeling for UI design can see that it just doesn't fit. Hell, even on iPhone and iPad the UI isn't the same. The different screen sizes suggest different app paradigms. The drilling down through lists model of the iPhone vs the master/detail model of the iPad.
Unifying the codebases and SDKs for OSX and iOS, whilst keeping different UIs is more plausible. But that wouldn't be presaged by UI changes.
I've been saying this for years - despite what boosters of electric cars would have you believe, there isn't a magical well of electrical power available at night.
Yes there is. You've been wrong for years.
The utilities have spent the better part of a century either finding customers for the overnight low demand period or optimizing their networks to not generate unneeded power in the first place.
But they haven't found enough customers for overnight electricity to make the demand anything like during the day. As to "optimising the networks", power station capacity that is there during the day is also there at night. Whilst much of it is currently taken off line, if night time power demands increase, then they can leave more of them on-line at night.
Of course there are consequences to changes. But that's a very different thing from there being catastrophic, or even difficult consequences.
Presumably new fridges etc will come equipped to interact with the smart grid as a feature. Participation will not require intelligence - it'll just happen as appliances get replaced.
The purpose is of course to smooth out the demand, such that less power stations have to be built to cope with peaks. And to make most use of greener sources of power.
If you see that as sinister, then you have a mental problem.
I haven't seen any "The electric car is gonna save the world!" hype from any greens. Only time you hear that is from trolls constructing straw men.
As to "hugh power spikes" - An typical overnight charge of an electric car would be done at 1.5kw*. A kettle is typically 3kw*. So making a cup of your favourite hot beverage is more of a spike than charging an electric car overnight.
On a fast charge from a beefier outlet, it might be 6kw*. 2 kettles worth.
(*This may vary from country to country given different power standards. But basically the "HUGE power spike" claim will look just as silly when compared to an everyday kettle in any country.)
The topic here is android, that is opensource, is given for free to phone manufacturers. But because of all the patents helds by all those companies whatever that tries to install that open source in their hardware gets sued and have to pay extra a lot for that opensource technology.
So maybe there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Especially when the "free" lunch provider is using someone else's ingredients.
The launcher thing is true, and indeed any slashdotter would know it, and most would be able to find a citation. Your claim that Apple execs had said they were going to merge iOS and OSX is however complete bullshit.
Second, you are thinking as a consumer of Apple products, not as an Apple executive intent on maximizing profits. I must sound like a broken record, but Apple is not your friend, and does not care what you want or need. The bottom line is simple. If they sell you a (theoretical) iPhone, iPad or Macbook running iOS, they control where you buy the apps, where you buy your music, movies and TV shows, and they take at least 30% of every transaction. If however they sell you a Macbook or Macbook Pro running OSX, they DO NOT control any of that. Apple will make iOS work on laptops, mark my words. The technical details will be worked out over the next few generations.
Your comment that companies are there to make a profit is a truism that vastly oversimplifies the topic. Yes, both MS and Apple are there to make a profit, but their strategies for doing so differ enormously. To think that because one company would do something to make a profit, another company would do it is mistaken. Especially if you think Apple would do something just because MS looks to be making steps in that direction.
Apple hasn't risen from near bankruptcy 15 years ago to being the biggest tech company now by simply snatching at every opportunity to make a buck. They've done it because Jobs goal is to create the very best designed products. In the correct belief that that's what people want to buy.
It's exactly the same way that Apple got it's earlier market in DTP. Not because Apple decided that a future DTP market would be worth lots of money and so they pursued it. But rather because Jobs had a background in Calligraphy, and he thought the then standard fixed pitch dot-matrix fonts were awful, so he pioneered proper font handling in the OS. It was a design decision, not a business decision that made their DTP market.
Likewise, iTunes and the App Store didn't come from a business decision to take a cut from media transactions. They came from design decisions to make things easier for users. Downloading a song from a website, putting the file in an appropriate place in the file system, and transferring it to a MP3 player was more hassle or too complicated for most people to do. Apple designed a complete integrated system to make that easy.
The incentive was never to control. To this day, with iTunes you can still rip your own tracks from CD, import songs in a number of formats. You can download from a website exactly as you could before iTunes store came along. The iTunes store is an addition to the facilities available, not a replacement. Additionally, against the argument that Apple wants to tightly control consumers is the fact that Apple pushed the record companies to allow them to put out songs without DRM.
Your comment doesn't actually contradict the GPs comment in any way. Notice the words "be able to" in his comment.
He's right. The two UIs are for devices with different use cases: iOS for interactions lasting a short time, mainly retrieving data, and consuming media. OSX for sessions of much longer period, inputting data, creating stuff.
The fact that there's more OS support for full screen apps doesn't change what OSX is.
The summary is wrong. Virgin aren't offering the WiFi free. You either have to be a customer of Virgin Media (cable at home) or Virgin Mobile (cellular) to get the WiFi free. Others will need to subscribe or pay-as-you-go for the WiFI, just as they do for BT OpenZone already.
No,it's definitely a long tube ride away, in that the Piccadilly line can take you all the way from central London to Heathrow. Takes forever through, hence the motivation for the Heathrow Express train service.
Appearances can be deceptive. Branson doesn't actually run a lot of the Virgin companies. The Virgin brand name is licensed out. In the case of Virgin Media, Branson owns 10% in return for the brand name. He's not the one calling the shots there. And if he was, it would be tarnishing his reputation, as Virgin Media has a pretty bad name in the UK.
It would be interesting (to me, as a graphics programmer in the games industry), if they stopped bullshitting. The claims in that video, when writtten down, are absolutely absurd. 20,000Gb of Ram. That's right. 20,000Gb of ram (at least!) to store the number of 'atoms' they claim they are displaying.
What figures are you using for that calculation.
Now, that simply can't be true - so they must either have left out a hell of a lot of information (such as, we are drawing the same object 20,000,000 times, or we are throwing everything at some procedural geometry shader)
Well of course they are drawing each object many times. So do all the polygon based games. It would be stupid not to. No one would store the full unique geometry for each blade of grass.
Simple tool to magically convert polygons (that we've been lambasting for the last 5mins) into an infinite detail point cloud (thereby adding detail to the mesh that was not there to begin with? WTF?)"".
You're ranting. The polygon's that they are lambasting are for example tree trunks with 6-12 sides. If instead they take a model with a very high polygon count, higher than would be used in a polygon based game, and convert it to their "point cloud" system, that would be quite reasonable, and the result would be an advance over current polygon based games.
I'm not saying this is genuine. It might be a hoax. But I don't see anything in your dismissal that proves it to be so.
I remember when Wolfenstein 3D came out. It seemed unbelievable that a world of textured polygons was being manipulated in real time on a 4.77 MHz PC. We'd seen nothing like it!
Later the details of how Carmack had done it came out. This wasn't the traditional matrix manipulation of 3D points, hidden surface removal, plotting of textures and the painter's algorithm we were used to. It was 2D raycasting from a simplified data structure. Each ray cast allowed the plotting of 128 pixels. Only 280 rays had to be cast per frame. And texturing was trivial as it was only ever vertical slices. Objects and enemies were just 2D sprites.
Now it all seems very obvious. But then, it was a hell of a breakthrough for 3D games.
Similar story when the groundbreaking Doom and Quake engines came out. The significant trick there that made the seemingly impossible possible was rapid hidden surface removal with binary search trees. And there's a parallel there in that this guy is saying his breakthrough is related to search.
Another thing that gives his claims a little credence for me is that the demo isn't actually that visually stunning. It has poor lighting and there is no animation. If you're going to create a fake engine for a video, then the thing to do is to ray-trace or otherwise render frame by frame in non-real time, and stitch the frames into a video.
And then there's something in the figures. He says he's created a 1km by 1km island. And that there are 64 "atoms" per cubic mm. Which suggests he's using 22 bits per dimension. If the height of the island is limited to 1/4 km. Then that's 64 bits per "atom" coordinate. Which sounds realistic, rather than something just plucked out of the air.
Whilst this guy could be a scammer, I'm more open to the possibility that he's genuinely found a new approach, having seen Carmack advance the state of the art in a big surprising jump 3 times over. I certainly don't see anything here that is so impossible he must be a scammer.
Slashdot Mirror
"Faceless bureaucrat" is still sounding paranoid.
Government regulations have lowered the death rate in many industries and on the roads over the years. So your claim that decisions made by people you don't know never turns out for the best is very obviously completely wrong.
Some decisions people you don't know turn out the worse for you. Some turn out the best for you. And that's no different from decisions people make for themselves. For example many people decide to smoke - that's a decision that invariably turns out for the worse.
It sure is. That's why I used it as the comparison. It's the kettle on during the commercial break of a popular show is the hardest spike the grid has to deal with. And they cope with that alright. They have people who's job it is to predict it. Spikes from charging electric cars will be both less severe and easier to predict.
No American knows how to make tea at all. That's why I left the options open.
Methinks you need find out the differences between torque, power and energy.
My post was about power, because that's what the post before was about.
Torque and energy are neither the same thing as power, nor the same thing as each other. You can't compare them. So no I don't need to check my math. You just need to stop posting about things you don't understand.
I don't disagree generally.
Launchpad makes little sense with indirect pointing
I find Launchpad makes a lot of sense. So much so that I've removed the Applications folder from my dock now. Thing is if you try to arrange the Applications folder into some sort of structure, with sub-directories for certain groups of apps, or pull certain apps out of sub-folders into the main Applications folder, you can run into problems when you have an auto update, or install a new version. You can end up with two different versions of the app in different places.
Launchpad enables you to create logical groupings by page and by folder, without changing the physical location of the app on disk.
It also provides a bigger canvas on which the apps are laid out, such that you don't have to scroll to find an app.
It's the they are presenting it as a better way to interface with your computer.
For sure they are selling the benefits of the new feature, as they would with any new feature. But I don't see anywhere where they are saying it's a "better way" than windowed mode.
Certainly it draws inspiration from iOS. The strap line for Lion from the day it was first announced was "Back to the Mac", whose primary meaning was to take some appropriate ideas from iOS and implement them in OSX.
But again that doesn't mean they are working towards merging the two OSs.
You're overstating the case with "resisting". Apple Apps have long used the full screen where appropriate: Quicktime, iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture etc. And as for Apple being consistent with it's own Human Interface Guidelines - that was never true. Apple always pioneered with the actual design of it's apps, with the HIG maybe getting updated later to reflect the new reality.
Unifying the OSX UI and the iOS UI simply isn't going to happen. Anyone with a feeling for UI design can see that it just doesn't fit. Hell, even on iPhone and iPad the UI isn't the same. The different screen sizes suggest different app paradigms. The drilling down through lists model of the iPhone vs the master/detail model of the iPad.
Unifying the codebases and SDKs for OSX and iOS, whilst keeping different UIs is more plausible. But that wouldn't be presaged by UI changes.
I've been saying this for years - despite what boosters of electric cars would have you believe, there isn't a magical well of electrical power available at night.
Yes there is. You've been wrong for years.
The utilities have spent the better part of a century either finding customers for the overnight low demand period or optimizing their networks to not generate unneeded power in the first place.
But they haven't found enough customers for overnight electricity to make the demand anything like during the day. As to "optimising the networks", power station capacity that is there during the day is also there at night. Whilst much of it is currently taken off line, if night time power demands increase, then they can leave more of them on-line at night.
Of course there are consequences to changes. But that's a very different thing from there being catastrophic, or even difficult consequences.
Presumably new fridges etc will come equipped to interact with the smart grid as a feature. Participation will not require intelligence - it'll just happen as appliances get replaced.
You sound more than a little paranoid.
The purpose is of course to smooth out the demand, such that less power stations have to be built to cope with peaks. And to make most use of greener sources of power.
If you see that as sinister, then you have a mental problem.
Yes, nuclear. Plus of course more wind and tidal generation. All 3 of which are green sources.
but if many people want to charge their cars at the same time, it will bring the grid down to its knees.
Let's have your source please.
I haven't seen any "The electric car is gonna save the world!" hype from any greens. Only time you hear that is from trolls constructing straw men.
As to "hugh power spikes" - An typical overnight charge of an electric car would be done at 1.5kw*. A kettle is typically 3kw*. So making a cup of your favourite hot beverage is more of a spike than charging an electric car overnight.
On a fast charge from a beefier outlet, it might be 6kw*. 2 kettles worth.
(*This may vary from country to country given different power standards. But basically the "HUGE power spike" claim will look just as silly when compared to an everyday kettle in any country.)
The topic here is android, that is opensource, is given for free to phone manufacturers. But because of all the patents helds by all those companies whatever that tries to install that open source in their hardware gets sued and have to pay extra a lot for that opensource technology.
So maybe there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Especially when the "free" lunch provider is using someone else's ingredients.
Google didn't obtain the Nortel papents. A consortium of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Sony did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel
The launcher thing is true, and indeed any slashdotter would know it, and most would be able to find a citation. Your claim that Apple execs had said they were going to merge iOS and OSX is however complete bullshit.
Second, you are thinking as a consumer of Apple products, not as an Apple executive intent on maximizing profits. I must sound like a broken record, but Apple is not your friend, and does not care what you want or need. The bottom line is simple. If they sell you a (theoretical) iPhone, iPad or Macbook running iOS, they control where you buy the apps, where you buy your music, movies and TV shows, and they take at least 30% of every transaction. If however they sell you a Macbook or Macbook Pro running OSX, they DO NOT control any of that. Apple will make iOS work on laptops, mark my words. The technical details will be worked out over the next few generations.
Your comment that companies are there to make a profit is a truism that vastly oversimplifies the topic. Yes, both MS and Apple are there to make a profit, but their strategies for doing so differ enormously. To think that because one company would do something to make a profit, another company would do it is mistaken. Especially if you think Apple would do something just because MS looks to be making steps in that direction.
Apple hasn't risen from near bankruptcy 15 years ago to being the biggest tech company now by simply snatching at every opportunity to make a buck. They've done it because Jobs goal is to create the very best designed products. In the correct belief that that's what people want to buy.
It's exactly the same way that Apple got it's earlier market in DTP. Not because Apple decided that a future DTP market would be worth lots of money and so they pursued it. But rather because Jobs had a background in Calligraphy, and he thought the then standard fixed pitch dot-matrix fonts were awful, so he pioneered proper font handling in the OS. It was a design decision, not a business decision that made their DTP market.
Likewise, iTunes and the App Store didn't come from a business decision to take a cut from media transactions. They came from design decisions to make things easier for users. Downloading a song from a website, putting the file in an appropriate place in the file system, and transferring it to a MP3 player was more hassle or too complicated for most people to do. Apple designed a complete integrated system to make that easy.
The incentive was never to control. To this day, with iTunes you can still rip your own tracks from CD, import songs in a number of formats. You can download from a website exactly as you could before iTunes store came along. The iTunes store is an addition to the facilities available, not a replacement. Additionally, against the argument that Apple wants to tightly control consumers is the fact that Apple pushed the record companies to allow them to put out songs without DRM.
Your comment doesn't actually contradict the GPs comment in any way. Notice the words "be able to" in his comment.
He's right. The two UIs are for devices with different use cases:
iOS for interactions lasting a short time, mainly retrieving data, and consuming media.
OSX for sessions of much longer period, inputting data, creating stuff.
The fact that there's more OS support for full screen apps doesn't change what OSX is.
Just go back through stories on Slashdot and you will find stuff from the front page.
No he won't. What you said is not true. It would have been a major story if it was. And it never was.
But I'm not bored enough for that. I can't even find info on the old stupid launcher.
Ah, so you tried to find a citation, couldn't find it, and then declared "you're not bored enough."
About 11 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_7
The summary is wrong. Virgin aren't offering the WiFi free. You either have to be a customer of Virgin Media (cable at home) or Virgin Mobile (cellular) to get the WiFi free. Others will need to subscribe or pay-as-you-go for the WiFI, just as they do for BT OpenZone already.
No,it's definitely a long tube ride away, in that the Piccadilly line can take you all the way from central London to Heathrow. Takes forever through, hence the motivation for the Heathrow Express train service.
Appearances can be deceptive. Branson doesn't actually run a lot of the Virgin companies. The Virgin brand name is licensed out. In the case of Virgin Media, Branson owns 10% in return for the brand name. He's not the one calling the shots there. And if he was, it would be tarnishing his reputation, as Virgin Media has a pretty bad name in the UK.
It would be interesting (to me, as a graphics programmer in the games industry), if they stopped bullshitting. The claims in that video, when writtten down, are absolutely absurd. 20,000Gb of Ram. That's right. 20,000Gb of ram (at least!) to store the number of 'atoms' they claim they are displaying.
What figures are you using for that calculation.
Now, that simply can't be true - so they must either have left out a hell of a lot of information (such as, we are drawing the same object 20,000,000 times, or we are throwing everything at some procedural geometry shader)
Well of course they are drawing each object many times. So do all the polygon based games. It would be stupid not to. No one would store the full unique geometry for each blade of grass.
Simple tool to magically convert polygons (that we've been lambasting for the last 5mins) into an infinite detail point cloud (thereby adding detail to the mesh that was not there to begin with? WTF?)"".
You're ranting. The polygon's that they are lambasting are for example tree trunks with 6-12 sides. If instead they take a model with a very high polygon count, higher than would be used in a polygon based game, and convert it to their "point cloud" system, that would be quite reasonable, and the result would be an advance over current polygon based games.
I'm not saying this is genuine. It might be a hoax. But I don't see anything in your dismissal that proves it to be so.
I remember when Wolfenstein 3D came out. It seemed unbelievable that a world of textured polygons was being manipulated in real time on a 4.77 MHz PC. We'd seen nothing like it!
Later the details of how Carmack had done it came out. This wasn't the traditional matrix manipulation of 3D points, hidden surface removal, plotting of textures and the painter's algorithm we were used to. It was 2D raycasting from a simplified data structure. Each ray cast allowed the plotting of 128 pixels. Only 280 rays had to be cast per frame. And texturing was trivial as it was only ever vertical slices. Objects and enemies were just 2D sprites.
Now it all seems very obvious. But then, it was a hell of a breakthrough for 3D games.
Similar story when the groundbreaking Doom and Quake engines came out. The significant trick there that made the seemingly impossible possible was rapid hidden surface removal with binary search trees. And there's a parallel there in that this guy is saying his breakthrough is related to search.
Another thing that gives his claims a little credence for me is that the demo isn't actually that visually stunning. It has poor lighting and there is no animation. If you're going to create a fake engine for a video, then the thing to do is to ray-trace or otherwise render frame by frame in non-real time, and stitch the frames into a video.
And then there's something in the figures. He says he's created a 1km by 1km island. And that there are 64 "atoms" per cubic mm. Which suggests he's using 22 bits per dimension. If the height of the island is limited to 1/4 km. Then that's 64 bits per "atom" coordinate. Which sounds realistic, rather than something just plucked out of the air.
Whilst this guy could be a scammer, I'm more open to the possibility that he's genuinely found a new approach, having seen Carmack advance the state of the art in a big surprising jump 3 times over. I certainly don't see anything here that is so impossible he must be a scammer.
And there you go. One of the retard ACs my filtering usually avoids, unmasked by his own stupidity in not clicking the post as AC box.