I have a Lucent Cellpipe DSL modem and Apple Airport Base Station coupled together as my home wireless network router. They work together quite happily but... Airport Base Station just looks great, more like a piece of art than a wireless router. It also runs perfectly silent. Lucent Cellpipe, on the other hand, looks butt-ugly AND IT WORKS LOUD - it constantly hisses and buzzes (I even learned to guess the operating mode from the kind of noise it makes - there's a special kind of hissing when the box is connecting with the PPPoE server, a special kind of hissing when it's connected and everything is OK, a special kind of hissing when WAN goes out of synchro). Obviously, wireless network nodes do not need to look fine and they don't even need to work quiet but... both devices are also a sort of a sample of the general technical culture for both companies. And guess which company's products I'll tend to buy in the future...
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite (which was basically just a better way to handle the good old nitroglycerine). TNT (trinitrotoluene) was invented by German scientist von Willbrand in 1860's.
Do I *WANT* to pay for an upgrade every year? No.
Do I *HAVE* to pay for an upgrade every year? No.
It's not that easy. Jaguar (10.2) was actually the first truly usable iteration of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma (10.0 and 10.1) were obviously interesting for an Unix geek, but for your average user, they just lacked all those minot tweaks and nuances, so at that stage, I still recommended to my non-computer savvy Mac friends to stick with the MacOS 9. So the transition from 10.1 to 10.2 was actually a sort of necessity - OS 9 is no longer supported anyhow and OS 10.1 wasn't a pleasure to use (to put is as mildly as possible). The premiere of 10.3 Panther was the first since the good old days of OS 8 and OS 9, when it was really up to your choice - if you like all the fancy new features like Expose, upgrade; but if you stick with Jaguar, nothing bad happens. New system will make the situation even more interesting, as Jaguar is still a fairly modern system, and Panther beats the crap out of anything (OK, my internal Mac zealot has finally spoke).
There is a definite trend of US politics having a detrimental effect on science.
This trend is actually at least half-century old. There is at least one known case of a Nobel prize lost by Americans due to politics. It's the case of Linus Pauling attempt to break the gene code. Pauling would most likely do what Watson & Crick did later, but he had no access to the X-Ray photos of the DNA crystal done by Maurice Wilkins & Rosalinde Franklin. He was in the "land of the free", the photos were in the good ol' UK. Pauling wanted to go to UK to see the photos, but was denied passport according to the infamous McCarran Act. That's how the USA lost the race for at least one Nobel. However, there were more less direct cases like this - Maccarthyism destroyed the status of America as the worldwide recognized icon of liberty, gained in 1930's. The brain drain surely continued aftewards, but the scientists coming to the USA were coming for the dollars, not freedom.
And how much of the Linux userbase has such an attitude?
While I might agree with you that it's actually a minority, I must still emphasize that this is the way the Linux userbase is perceived by men of charge in valid corporations. Such as Apple, Inc.
It's also an up and coming userbase though. Linux is growing very quickly among the younger crowd and getting them interested in macintosh software is a good way to increase their userbase down the road.
It's also a "down-with-IP", "information wants to be free", "I don't want to pay for watching this movie", "I don't want to pay for this song", "down with even the most liberal forms of DRM" userbase.
So is that one shot of vodka, or a 750ml/1000ml bottle?
Being russian, I'd only hope it were the 2nd or 3rd.
Well, from my experience with Russian bars & restaurants, if you say to the waiter or the bartender "vodku, pozhaluista" ("vodka, please"), he will understand this order not as a single shot or a single bottle, but as an unlimited refill until you drop unconsciously on the floor. I think this is the case - especially that if you drink vodka in a sauna, you can actually drop unconscious after just one shot (even if you're Russian or compatible).
Was this whole "space exploration" thing just the World's Biggest PR Stunt To Piss Off The Commies?
In a nutshell - yes.
Re:Actually, wrong thread for Mac advocacy
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 1
It's hard for me to believe that statement. Performance is a relation of execution time. Execution time = #Instructions * Instructions/Cycle * Clock Cycle.
You are right, of course - maybe I just didn't make my point clear enough, sorry for that. I didn't mean that 1 GHz of one CPU can be compared to 1 GHz of another. What I said that in games there is no noticeable difference. Most likely, the reason is not the CPU architecture itself but the way the games are being ported to MacOS. In a (sad) majority of cases, the games are developed first at Wintel and console market, and much later to the Mac market. Usually it's being done in a hurry, because a '2002 game in 2004 could be hard to sell, especially for the typical Mac price tag of $49.99 (or so). The resulting code is far from being optimized and thus the speed gain of a superior CPU architecture is consumed by bad optimization - which results in gaming performance of a 1 GHz G4 roughly equivalent to that of a 1 GHz P4.
Actually, wrong thread for Mac advocacy
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A 17" PowerBook for unixy needs (i.e. Mac OS X and Linux). That 1.5ghz is roughly equivalent to a P4 running at 2.5 ghz
In many applications it really is, but unfortunately, gaming is not one of them. In games, 1 GHz of a G4 is actually quite like 1 GHz of a P4 (there's no noticeable difference to the player, that is). No, I made no scientific research on this topic, but I played a lot on Macs and PCs since many years. There's also circumstantial evidence to my claim - system requirements of Mac game ports usually state the same CPU clock as their Windows equivalents. Being as much a Mac addict as I am, I wouldn't recommend powerbook as a "fragbook", even if the recent models should be quite capable with the 128 VRAM Radeon 9700 Mobility cards. But even if you put the lack of some titles aside (what if the LAN party you are invited to plays "Counterstrike"?), the 1.5 GHz CPU is exactly what it is, a 1.5 GHz CPU.
I am a Mac user. I am even a Mac gamer. I am even a Mac LAN gamer (as a geek parent, I play strategy games with my kids on iBooks/iMacs connected via Airport). I agree that Macs have interesting advantages in this case, like the incredible ease of the wireless LAN creation. But I wouldn't qualify any of the current Apple machines as a "fragbook" - and they certainly don't need that kind of publicity.
Not sure what exactly I'm trying to say with this post (...)
It's quite common, actually, these days and maybe that's why...
Many/most people today (especially young people), do not view file sharing of music and videos as wrong.
...true, but actually many/most people today do not view DMCA, DRM, DCSS and probably even the RIAA/MPAA actions as wrong. It's a bit like speeding - most people do this at least once in their driving carreer, yet generally accept the idea of speed limits. Consistent? Of course, not, but that's how human psyche works.
Since most of the Hollywood movies physics is nothing but pure bullshit, this course could give you the one and only degree of double BS - Bachelor Of Science In Bullshiting!
There is no way I can practically memorize 12 secure passwords a month.
Buy an iPod and just keep them plainly in your "Notes" section, or if you want to go the ubergeek way, rename a few songs for fake password-titles. You'll be safe as long as someone steals your iPod - but then you'd have bigger things to worry anyway.
The key is to make them memorable, pronouncable non-words.
Reading a lot of science-fiction and fantasy books also helps much - especially when you can read them in some non-Western language. "Rohan" or "Alderan" will be too obvious, but "BalduryiBadubiny" won't be that easy to be crack by brute force - while it's very easy to memorize (and pronounce!) if you can read Stanislaw Lem in Polish.
Asus makes laptops with upgradable CPUs. You can even buy them barebones (No CPU/RAM/Harddrive).
Actually, Apple tried that too. Check here for an informative, if slightly outdated (newer upgrades are available since then) list of these upgrades. However, the economics of upgrading is usually doubtful. I was considering one back in the days of my old powerbook 1400 - finally I reckoned that for the price of new battery + USB card + new CPU + more RAM I can just sell my powerbook and buy a brand new iBook... and still have a much better machine. When you want a faster car, it's usually a better idea to sell the old vehicle and buy a new one, rather than go through the mess of tuning. It takes a hobbyist to prefer the second way - with laptops it's similar.
There are a lot of people who actually don't use their laptop to play or store music on.
Since quite a long time Apple tends to offer laptops that can be your primary computer - not just an add-on to a beige-box under the desk. For an iBook/powerbook user there is no question "why store your music/digital photos/digital movies on your laptop?" - their answer is WHY NOT, ACTUALLY? Try it, and you'll think of returning to the old days of separate desktop/notebook as of moving back to your parents.
As a mac user I am relatively unaffected by windows exploits.
Don't tell me you never got any My.Doom email. Obviously, the virus itself can do you no harm, but the sheer bandwith consumed by few dozens of messages like this can affect your bank account (especially when checking email by a cellphone). In the best case, it affects you as a Major Pain In The Backside. Unfortunately, the Windows lack of basic security affects us all, even Mac and Linux users.
Accordint to the structuralist theory of language and society, you cannot copy the former without copying the latter. This means that if this experiment is supposed to have any value, all the participants should also create a martriarchal polyamorous sexual commune. Which reminds me: do they still need volunteers?
Columbus knew less about the New World than we do about Mars and the Moon. Hell, he didn't even think it was *there*, and if anyone had challenged him he wouldn't have been able to rule out the possibility that it was filled with cannibal giants or fire-breathing dragons or anything. He was lucky it turned out so hospitable, just look at what happened to the pilgrims a few decades later.
Agreed - he was lucky, but many explorers were not. How many explorers perished in the far North, trying in vain to establish colonies in lands that turned out to be uninhabitable? The case of Norse settlements in Greenland is a well example of how such overoptimistic colonization project could end. There is actually no reason to hope that the Moon/Mars colonization attempt will go the Columbus/Mayflower way - it could be also Eric the Red way. Personally, I'm afraid the latter seems more plausible.
Not that easy. A is already taken by a popular TV series.. The same series actually consumed the letter T. B is unusable, as it used to be associated with a failed operating system. C is, obviously, a popular programming language. Now, we could settle for D, but I think it could be confusing for chemists, who use it to describe chiral isomers. E would be a bad idea, as e- is one of the most hated prefixes of the present day. F obviously if out of question, as it stands for a chemical element, and G would create too many lame slashdot jokes related to clitoris. I could actually go this way through the whole ASCII table, but I'm too lazy for it.
Of course it CAN be done. Why not? We can get there, we can get food there, we can get power and life support systems there. There are research bases in Antarctica, there are research bases underwater. What are you rambling about??
There is a difference between a base and a colony. I don't deny a technical possibility of a Lunar base - just as there is a possibility of an orbital base. However, just as the International Space Station is not a colony, a hypothetical lunar outpost won't be one either. In order to be called a colony, it would have to possess at least some rudimentary independence of the supplies from Earth. And so far this seems unlikely.
If we could turn a station on the moon into a pseudo-colony, I think that would have some nice potential for space travel and perhaps even more affordable space tourism.
Yeah, "if". But what if it can't be done? There is no chance to make an Antarctic colony, where the conditions still are much more friendly than on Moon. I doubt if there is any chance to make anything colony-like on Moon - there is no serious plan how to make water and oxygen on the lunar desert (not to mention food or anything useful). All we hear are Star Trek-like hypothetical scenarios, that maybe there could be some frozen water. Well, what if there isn't? The comparison of the Lunar colonies and the New World colonies of XVI-XVII century is fundamentally flawed - Columbus did not have to carry oxygen from Spain. Heck, he could even repair his ships from the wood found on the new continent. He arrived into a land where human beings can sustain their own living - it was far from uninhabitable desert that we have on the Moon or Mars. We can't have an underwater colony somewhere in the middle of an ocean. We can't have a colony on Antarctic. What makes anybody think we can have a colony on Moon? Is it just because once there was a TV series about one?
Boy, the 17" Aluminum Apple Notebooks are heavy enough. I can't imagine what an Aluminum-Lead one would be like.
You can take an estimate from this fine 17-pound Mac Portable. It used a lead battery, so I guess it's safe to call it Plastic-Lead. Although it was often called Marketing-Disaster.
Actually, I was dreaming about this kind of User Interface ever since I played the classic "Beneath Steel Sky" graphical adventure. In this game, the player enters a virtual reality system to perform certain file management functions (basically, find an encrypted file and decrypt it). The game designers created a beautiful and consistent interface just for the game sake and I always wanted to have a real file manager like this. There's a screenshot gallery here, with sample screenshot from the VR UI. In fact, the VR Dock looks almost like a real Dock from MacOS X, introduced many years later. I wonder if Jonathan Ive played this game...
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Lucent Cellpipe DSL modem and Apple Airport Base Station coupled together as my home wireless network router. They work together quite happily but... Airport Base Station just looks great, more like a piece of art than a wireless router. It also runs perfectly silent. Lucent Cellpipe, on the other hand, looks butt-ugly AND IT WORKS LOUD - it constantly hisses and buzzes (I even learned to guess the operating mode from the kind of noise it makes - there's a special kind of hissing when the box is connecting with the PPPoE server, a special kind of hissing when it's connected and everything is OK, a special kind of hissing when WAN goes out of synchro). Obviously, wireless network nodes do not need to look fine and they don't even need to work quiet but... both devices are also a sort of a sample of the general technical culture for both companies. And guess which company's products I'll tend to buy in the future...
I completely agree except for one thing:
Alfred Nobel, the inventor of TNT
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite (which was basically just a better way to handle the good old nitroglycerine). TNT (trinitrotoluene) was invented by German scientist von Willbrand in 1860's.
Do I *WANT* to pay for an upgrade every year? No.
Do I *HAVE* to pay for an upgrade every year? No.
It's not that easy. Jaguar (10.2) was actually the first truly usable iteration of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma (10.0 and 10.1) were obviously interesting for an Unix geek, but for your average user, they just lacked all those minot tweaks and nuances, so at that stage, I still recommended to my non-computer savvy Mac friends to stick with the MacOS 9. So the transition from 10.1 to 10.2 was actually a sort of necessity - OS 9 is no longer supported anyhow and OS 10.1 wasn't a pleasure to use (to put is as mildly as possible). The premiere of 10.3 Panther was the first since the good old days of OS 8 and OS 9, when it was really up to your choice - if you like all the fancy new features like Expose, upgrade; but if you stick with Jaguar, nothing bad happens. New system will make the situation even more interesting, as Jaguar is still a fairly modern system, and Panther beats the crap out of anything (OK, my internal Mac zealot has finally spoke).
There is a definite trend of US politics having a detrimental effect on science.
This trend is actually at least half-century old. There is at least one known case of a Nobel prize lost by Americans due to politics. It's the case of Linus Pauling attempt to break the gene code. Pauling would most likely do what Watson & Crick did later, but he had no access to the X-Ray photos of the DNA crystal done by Maurice Wilkins & Rosalinde Franklin. He was in the "land of the free", the photos were in the good ol' UK. Pauling wanted to go to UK to see the photos, but was denied passport according to the infamous McCarran Act. That's how the USA lost the race for at least one Nobel. However, there were more less direct cases like this - Maccarthyism destroyed the status of America as the worldwide recognized icon of liberty, gained in 1930's. The brain drain surely continued aftewards, but the scientists coming to the USA were coming for the dollars, not freedom.
And how much of the Linux userbase has such an attitude?
While I might agree with you that it's actually a minority, I must still emphasize that this is the way the Linux userbase is perceived by men of charge in valid corporations. Such as Apple, Inc.
It's also an up and coming userbase though. Linux is growing very quickly among the younger crowd and getting them interested in macintosh software is a good way to increase their userbase down the road.
It's also a "down-with-IP", "information wants to be free", "I don't want to pay for watching this movie", "I don't want to pay for this song", "down with even the most liberal forms of DRM" userbase.
So is that one shot of vodka, or a 750ml/1000ml bottle? Being russian, I'd only hope it were the 2nd or 3rd.
Well, from my experience with Russian bars & restaurants, if you say to the waiter or the bartender "vodku, pozhaluista" ("vodka, please"), he will understand this order not as a single shot or a single bottle, but as an unlimited refill until you drop unconsciously on the floor. I think this is the case - especially that if you drink vodka in a sauna, you can actually drop unconscious after just one shot (even if you're Russian or compatible).
Was this whole "space exploration" thing just the World's Biggest PR Stunt To Piss Off The Commies?
In a nutshell - yes.
It's hard for me to believe that statement. Performance is a relation of execution time. Execution time = #Instructions * Instructions/Cycle * Clock Cycle.
You are right, of course - maybe I just didn't make my point clear enough, sorry for that. I didn't mean that 1 GHz of one CPU can be compared to 1 GHz of another. What I said that in games there is no noticeable difference. Most likely, the reason is not the CPU architecture itself but the way the games are being ported to MacOS. In a (sad) majority of cases, the games are developed first at Wintel and console market, and much later to the Mac market. Usually it's being done in a hurry, because a '2002 game in 2004 could be hard to sell, especially for the typical Mac price tag of $49.99 (or so). The resulting code is far from being optimized and thus the speed gain of a superior CPU architecture is consumed by bad optimization - which results in gaming performance of a 1 GHz G4 roughly equivalent to that of a 1 GHz P4.
A 17" PowerBook for unixy needs (i.e. Mac OS X and Linux). That 1.5ghz is roughly equivalent to a P4 running at 2.5 ghz
In many applications it really is, but unfortunately, gaming is not one of them. In games, 1 GHz of a G4 is actually quite like 1 GHz of a P4 (there's no noticeable difference to the player, that is). No, I made no scientific research on this topic, but I played a lot on Macs and PCs since many years. There's also circumstantial evidence to my claim - system requirements of Mac game ports usually state the same CPU clock as their Windows equivalents. Being as much a Mac addict as I am, I wouldn't recommend powerbook as a "fragbook", even if the recent models should be quite capable with the 128 VRAM Radeon 9700 Mobility cards. But even if you put the lack of some titles aside (what if the LAN party you are invited to plays "Counterstrike"?), the 1.5 GHz CPU is exactly what it is, a 1.5 GHz CPU.
I am a Mac user. I am even a Mac gamer. I am even a Mac LAN gamer (as a geek parent, I play strategy games with my kids on iBooks/iMacs connected via Airport). I agree that Macs have interesting advantages in this case, like the incredible ease of the wireless LAN creation. But I wouldn't qualify any of the current Apple machines as a "fragbook" - and they certainly don't need that kind of publicity.
Not sure what exactly I'm trying to say with this post (...)
...true, but actually many/most people today do not view DMCA, DRM, DCSS and probably even the RIAA/MPAA actions as wrong. It's a bit like speeding - most people do this at least once in their driving carreer, yet generally accept the idea of speed limits. Consistent? Of course, not, but that's how human psyche works.
It's quite common, actually, these days and maybe that's why...
Many/most people today (especially young people), do not view file sharing of music and videos as wrong.
Since most of the Hollywood movies physics is nothing but pure bullshit, this course could give you the one and only degree of double BS - Bachelor Of Science In Bullshiting!
There is no way I can practically memorize 12 secure passwords a month.
Buy an iPod and just keep them plainly in your "Notes" section, or if you want to go the ubergeek way, rename a few songs for fake password-titles. You'll be safe as long as someone steals your iPod - but then you'd have bigger things to worry anyway.
The key is to make them memorable, pronouncable non-words.
Reading a lot of science-fiction and fantasy books also helps much - especially when you can read them in some non-Western language. "Rohan" or "Alderan" will be too obvious, but "BalduryiBadubiny" won't be that easy to be crack by brute force - while it's very easy to memorize (and pronounce!) if you can read Stanislaw Lem in Polish.
Asus makes laptops with upgradable CPUs. You can even buy them barebones (No CPU/RAM/Harddrive).
Actually, Apple tried that too. Check here for an informative, if slightly outdated (newer upgrades are available since then) list of these upgrades. However, the economics of upgrading is usually doubtful. I was considering one back in the days of my old powerbook 1400 - finally I reckoned that for the price of new battery + USB card + new CPU + more RAM I can just sell my powerbook and buy a brand new iBook... and still have a much better machine. When you want a faster car, it's usually a better idea to sell the old vehicle and buy a new one, rather than go through the mess of tuning. It takes a hobbyist to prefer the second way - with laptops it's similar.
There are a lot of people who actually don't use their laptop to play or store music on.
Since quite a long time Apple tends to offer laptops that can be your primary computer - not just an add-on to a beige-box under the desk. For an iBook/powerbook user there is no question "why store your music/digital photos/digital movies on your laptop?" - their answer is WHY NOT, ACTUALLY? Try it, and you'll think of returning to the old days of separate desktop/notebook as of moving back to your parents.
No, go price out a PC notebook with all the bells and whistles that you want. What if you don't need firewire? Most people don't.
Yeah, sure, most people have absolutely no need to use the most popular digital music player of the world.
As a mac user I am relatively unaffected by windows exploits.
Don't tell me you never got any My.Doom email. Obviously, the virus itself can do you no harm, but the sheer bandwith consumed by few dozens of messages like this can affect your bank account (especially when checking email by a cellphone). In the best case, it affects you as a Major Pain In The Backside. Unfortunately, the Windows lack of basic security affects us all, even Mac and Linux users.
Accordint to the structuralist theory of language and society, you cannot copy the former without copying the latter. This means that if this experiment is supposed to have any value, all the participants should also create a martriarchal polyamorous sexual commune. Which reminds me: do they still need volunteers?
Columbus knew less about the New World than we do about Mars and the Moon. Hell, he didn't even think it was *there*, and if anyone had challenged him he wouldn't have been able to rule out the possibility that it was filled with cannibal giants or fire-breathing dragons or anything. He was lucky it turned out so hospitable, just look at what happened to the pilgrims a few decades later.
Agreed - he was lucky, but many explorers were not. How many explorers perished in the far North, trying in vain to establish colonies in lands that turned out to be uninhabitable? The case of Norse settlements in Greenland is a well example of how such overoptimistic colonization project could end. There is actually no reason to hope that the Moon/Mars colonization attempt will go the Columbus/Mayflower way - it could be also Eric the Red way. Personally, I'm afraid the latter seems more plausible.
Not that easy. A is already taken by a popular TV series.. The same series actually consumed the letter T. B is unusable, as it used to be associated with a failed operating system. C is, obviously, a popular programming language. Now, we could settle for D, but I think it could be confusing for chemists, who use it to describe chiral isomers. E would be a bad idea, as e- is one of the most hated prefixes of the present day. F obviously if out of question, as it stands for a chemical element, and G would create too many lame slashdot jokes related to clitoris. I could actually go this way through the whole ASCII table, but I'm too lazy for it.
Of course it CAN be done. Why not? We can get there, we can get food there, we can get power and life support systems there. There are research bases in Antarctica, there are research bases underwater. What are you rambling about??
There is a difference between a base and a colony. I don't deny a technical possibility of a Lunar base - just as there is a possibility of an orbital base. However, just as the International Space Station is not a colony, a hypothetical lunar outpost won't be one either. In order to be called a colony, it would have to possess at least some rudimentary independence of the supplies from Earth. And so far this seems unlikely.
If we could turn a station on the moon into a pseudo-colony, I think that would have some nice potential for space travel and perhaps even more affordable space tourism.
Yeah, "if". But what if it can't be done? There is no chance to make an Antarctic colony, where the conditions still are much more friendly than on Moon. I doubt if there is any chance to make anything colony-like on Moon - there is no serious plan how to make water and oxygen on the lunar desert (not to mention food or anything useful). All we hear are Star Trek-like hypothetical scenarios, that maybe there could be some frozen water. Well, what if there isn't? The comparison of the Lunar colonies and the New World colonies of XVI-XVII century is fundamentally flawed - Columbus did not have to carry oxygen from Spain. Heck, he could even repair his ships from the wood found on the new continent. He arrived into a land where human beings can sustain their own living - it was far from uninhabitable desert that we have on the Moon or Mars. We can't have an underwater colony somewhere in the middle of an ocean. We can't have a colony on Antarctic. What makes anybody think we can have a colony on Moon? Is it just because once there was a TV series about one?
Boy, the 17" Aluminum Apple Notebooks are heavy enough. I can't imagine what an Aluminum-Lead one would be like.
You can take an estimate from this fine 17-pound Mac Portable. It used a lead battery, so I guess it's safe to call it Plastic-Lead. Although it was often called Marketing-Disaster.
Actually, I was dreaming about this kind of User Interface ever since I played the classic "Beneath Steel Sky" graphical adventure. In this game, the player enters a virtual reality system to perform certain file management functions (basically, find an encrypted file and decrypt it). The game designers created a beautiful and consistent interface just for the game sake and I always wanted to have a real file manager like this. There's a screenshot gallery here, with sample screenshot from the VR UI. In fact, the VR Dock looks almost like a real Dock from MacOS X, introduced many years later. I wonder if Jonathan Ive played this game...