But the lift capacity of those little white tubes and that big orange thing on the outside of the Shuttle are again leaps and bounds ahead of Saturn V. It's all that extra mass of the Shuttle itself that is the problem - hence all the talk about variants of the Shuttle Transport System, such as the Shuttle-B.
I think that the problem with the shuttle is that it confuses the whole heavy-lift-versus-getting-humans-up-there thing. Possibly now that we have the ISS in a semiworking state, we should think of adding a new vehicle to the fleet, something that carries the shuttle main engines, but doesn't have that huge permanent hollow bit in the middle - do we really need to make the protective cover for things we intend to take up but not bring back so permanent (and heavy?).
In terms of the Shuttle and its getting-humans-to-orbit job, I think the saying, "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" fits well.
Why not have Dashboard run during idle time, like so many other apps?
To me, it seems that Apple has developed a fetish for having things happen EXACTLY when I don't want them to. I still have no honkin' clue why I have to wait for the 3 external FireWire hard drives I have attatched to my computer to spin up (one by one, not all at once!) before the computer will eject my USB key, display an open or save panel, etc.
Granted, I haven't bought Tiger yet, maybe that particular asininity has been fixed.
"Modern" (moving away from the solution domain towards the problem domain and letting the coder ignore details like memory management that the computer can handle itself) is evolving to mean garbage collection, dynamically typing and higher-order functions for some people.
I would argue that Objective-C has a higher overall score for those three features than Java. But moving on, if I were looking for a truly high-level language for my app development (which I am), I wouldn't want ObjC or Java. ObjC is nice, but you still have to memory manage, and I don't think Java counts. It is incredibly buzzword-enabled, but in terms of development and debugging time - which is the root of why I like to work in HLLs - I find that it's still in the same ballpark as C++.
My wet dream for rapid Cocoa development is for Apple to quit forcing AppleScript to lurch and vomit through life with shoddy cover-ups like AppleScript Stuido and Automator and let it die like it so desperately wants to. In it's place, they could give us scripting in a *REAL* language - Dylan, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, anything - and give us an AppleScript Studio type development environment with the same close bindings to ObjC/Cocoa, the same OSA wonderfulness, but a language that doesn't taste like rusty razor blades and dish soap.
I went to a high school while they were doing a pilot program on replacing textbooks with laptops. My observation?
It's a stupid idea.
It took good teachers, and made them less good teachers by forcing them to spend more time hunting for good electronic sources and getting them distributed to the students and less time planning cirricula.
It took bad teachers, and made them terrible teachers by making them spend most the class time getting help from the students on how to work a computer rather than teaching them.
Worst of all, it took a good school, and made it into a mediocre school by crippling its educational budget.
It's not like they provide any educational advantage, either. "Wooo! we have laptops instead of textbooks! Now we've signifigantly reduced the pool of good material with which we can teach. And we've made it harder for our students to study by giving them their information in a medium they cannot annotate, forcing them to study in places where electricity is readily available and where it's OK to pull out a laptop, and put their educational materials at the mercy of every piece of malware on the planet." Great job, guys.
There is an amazing amount of research that goes into figuring out what the best teaching methods are. Why is it that schools seem to largely ignore this, and chase after random fashions instead? Why don't we expect the people who teach our children to think critically to think critically themselves? Why are we wasting our precious education dollars with abandon?
Cocoa-Java apps are _not_ cross-platform. About the only advantages I could see getting from it is not having to make your developers learn Objective-C and being able to work in a garbage-collected environment.
But I don't think either of those advantages are great enough to make it worth Apple's while to spend money on maintaining Cocoa bindings for Java. Objective-C is really not difficult to learn, and has plenty of syntactic sugar to keep you happy - especially if you're using Apple's runtime. And reference counting isn't perfect, but it's also almost brainless to use after a few days of really getting used to it.
Much better in my opinion for Apple to put their Java efforts into trying to keep the JRE on OS X up to date, and possibly to put a bit more effort into getting it to run well.
The interesting thing about his examples - Mozilla, Apache, KDE, Gnome, Linux - is that all five of them are largely developed by full-time paid employees.
There are plenty of companies that have tried to come out with something comparable to Photoshop, but at a much lower price. Two things are working against them - first, they have a hard time breaking into the low cost photo editing realm because they have to compete with the name recognition of Photoshop CS, and, increasingly, the cheapness of the GIMP (which I have noticed seems to be breaking into the mainstream).
But, for the part that you want, which is to be just as featureful as Photoshop, the big reason why there aren't any cheap players is that any company that would come out with a serious competitor would have to catch up with an industry-standard program put out by the biggest (and probably the richest) player in the field, and which has been in development for 18 years now.
Heaven knows how many person-years worth of programmer time you'd have to pay for to develop a serious competitor, but it's definitely not something you're going to pull off without either already being a large software development firm, or having a large amount of venture capital (good luck on that last one). Either way, in order to break even, you're still going to have to set the price way above the $300 mark in order to pay the bills. There simply aren't enough photographers and digital artists out there to generate enough sales to generate a profit at a lower price.
Is that the Windows market is oversaturated. I'm going to suggest that the number of commercial software developers a platform can support is related logrithmically to its user base. Given how massive the Wintel platform's market share is, there is just no room for a small shareware developer looking to break into the market.
Just do a Tucows or Download.com search for _anything_. You'll find about 30 other apps, many of them freeware. And frequently a couple of them will be huge well-established behemoths. Omni would have been insane to make OmniGraffle a Windows-only program with Visio already there. Go do the same searches on the Apple secion of VersionTracker, and you won't find nearly as much stuff, and frequently a bunch of it will have only half the features you want.
And the games market for Macs is so tiny that you can write almost anything and bet that you will get at least some following. There's a Mac-only MMORPG that, technology-wise, is far far behind anything else on the market, but it still manages to keep a loyal community even in the face of games like World of Warcraft.
(Of course, that's probably because there also seem to be a lot of cheapskate, half-assed Mac gamers like me who were unsure about paying $50 for the game PLUS $10-15/mo subscription (My Sirius radio cost less than that!) when we know there's a good chance we would get bored and quit 3 or 4 months into it when that price including startup costs still works out to $30 or so a month. And when we saw that the minimum specs were way above what we had sitting on our desks, that was the nail in the coffin. The shaky, half-assed attempt to get back on topic moral: If you write Mac games, make sure they will run on well-mildewed hardware. On average, Mac users let their computers age much longer than PC users do (I've heard twice as long quoted a few times), and there are not many among them who are the kind to buy a new computer just to be able to play the latest game. If we really cared about games anywhere near that much, we never would have ditched Windows in the first place.)
I was actually thinking about my Mac. I generally avoid Java on Linux for anything other than applets because I can get native programs that integrate better with my desktop and don't suck up all my RAM (my Linux box is aging).
Wait. . . I think you basically just said, "Folks want to get the best person for the job for as little pay as possible, and that is exaclty why they don't care how good of a person for the job you are."
In other words, maybe there's been a bit of a backslide over the past couple years, but I think that overall most games have improved quite a bit since, say, King's Quest I.
Though I do wish the adventure game genre would return to popularity. LucasArts used to make some really excellent games.
Seriously. If you don't have a need to worry about appearances (i.e., she's not taking it to corporate meetings), stickers (lots of them) go a long way. Thieves who aren't just stealing it for their own personal use will think twice about stealing anything that is easily identifiable because it would be easy to pick out at a pawn shop, and black-market type folks aren't going to want something that stands out so much. Thieves are generally looking for a quick buck, so they generally aren't going to be interested in scraping all those stickers off, either.
Also, in addition to writing down serial numbers, write down her MAC address (both the ethernet and the wireless if she has both). If it does get stolen, hand them off to the school's computer center. I know of two separate cases where students stole school computers, and were caught within a day the moment they plugged the thing into the network and turned it on. Hopefully they would be willing to do such a thing for your daughter in the event that such a thing happens.
But the single most important thing you can do is make sure that she locks her door and, if she has a ground floor room, keeps the windows closed when she's out. A lot of people I knew at college thought they didn't need to because folks around the dorm would keep an eye on things or something like that, but it just isn't true. There were several cases at my school (which only had 1,100 students) where someone from outside the college just walked into the dorms while classes were in session, tried doors, and walked out with the expensive stuff from the rooms with unlocked doors. If they walked in on someone, they would just make an excuse to the effect of, "Sorry, wrong room." And act like they were visiting someone and don't really know their way around very well yet.
And it's not exactly related to electronics, but, if she uses a purse, get her to quit. Otherwise, she's going to get sick of lugging it around at a party or while she's hunting for books at the library and she'll leave it next to the coat pile or in her study cubby, only to come back and find it gone.
Re:Bad solution to a problem which is already solv
on
New Keyboard Technology
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It seems like this keyboard only gives you the power to make your situation worse.
On a normal keyboard, with the keys staggered, each finger can reach five keys easily - the one it's hovering over, and the two above and two below it.
On this fancy one, they have the keys arranged in a grid (which is the only other basic key pattern I can think of when you're working with a flat surface). In this situation, each finger can only reach three keys easily. And I fail to see what advantage straight up and down motion has over up and to the side a bit.
Other than that, I think the difference is just the angle of the keys with respect to your hand or body. I always figured it would be sufficient (and about $160 cheaper) to turn the keyboard. It's for gaming - you're only using one hand, anyway.
Now, if it were about 10 years ago and you wanted to make one of these with two or four separate pads on which you could arrange the keys so that several people could work from the same logical keyboard device for all those old multiple-players-on-the-same-screen games where you had to share the keyboard with your buddies, then we'd be talking.
I find it rather amusing that the keyboard is called "Ergodex," but in the photo the guy who is using it has his wrist folded back on itself, which is supposedly one of the worst no-nos in input device ergonomics.
I concur, but why bother with the fireproof safe? I really doubt that a DVD-R could survive the heat that transfers through the safe given that they can't survive direct sunlight very well, either. Best to make sure that the really important stuff is in two different physical locations and hope that they aren't both burned down at the same time.
Also, you should periodically make new copies of both DVDs. I have some CD-Rs that haven't lasted three years, and I doubt that DVDs last as long, given the higher data density.
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But the lift capacity of those little white tubes and that big orange thing on the outside of the Shuttle are again leaps and bounds ahead of Saturn V. It's all that extra mass of the Shuttle itself that is the problem - hence all the talk about variants of the Shuttle Transport System, such as the Shuttle-B.
I think that the problem with the shuttle is that it confuses the whole heavy-lift-versus-getting-humans-up-there thing. Possibly now that we have the ISS in a semiworking state, we should think of adding a new vehicle to the fleet, something that carries the shuttle main engines, but doesn't have that huge permanent hollow bit in the middle - do we really need to make the protective cover for things we intend to take up but not bring back so permanent (and heavy?).
In terms of the Shuttle and its getting-humans-to-orbit job, I think the saying, "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" fits well.
Hey! That's a great idea! And while they're at it, they can install Linux on all the tiles and make a Beowulf cluster out of them!
Why not have Dashboard run during idle time, like so many other apps?
To me, it seems that Apple has developed a fetish for having things happen EXACTLY when I don't want them to. I still have no honkin' clue why I have to wait for the 3 external FireWire hard drives I have attatched to my computer to spin up (one by one, not all at once!) before the computer will eject my USB key, display an open or save panel, etc.
Granted, I haven't bought Tiger yet, maybe that particular asininity has been fixed.
"Modern" (moving away from the solution domain towards the problem domain and letting the coder ignore details like memory management that the computer can handle itself) is evolving to mean garbage collection, dynamically typing and higher-order functions for some people.
I would argue that Objective-C has a higher overall score for those three features than Java. But moving on, if I were looking for a truly high-level language for my app development (which I am), I wouldn't want ObjC or Java. ObjC is nice, but you still have to memory manage, and I don't think Java counts. It is incredibly buzzword-enabled, but in terms of development and debugging time - which is the root of why I like to work in HLLs - I find that it's still in the same ballpark as C++.
My wet dream for rapid Cocoa development is for Apple to quit forcing AppleScript to lurch and vomit through life with shoddy cover-ups like AppleScript Stuido and Automator and let it die like it so desperately wants to. In it's place, they could give us scripting in a *REAL* language - Dylan, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, anything - and give us an AppleScript Studio type development environment with the same close bindings to ObjC/Cocoa, the same OSA wonderfulness, but a language that doesn't taste like rusty razor blades and dish soap.
I went to a high school while they were doing a pilot program on replacing textbooks with laptops. My observation?
It's a stupid idea.
It took good teachers, and made them less good teachers by forcing them to spend more time hunting for good electronic sources and getting them distributed to the students and less time planning cirricula.
It took bad teachers, and made them terrible teachers by making them spend most the class time getting help from the students on how to work a computer rather than teaching them.
Worst of all, it took a good school, and made it into a mediocre school by crippling its educational budget.
It's not like they provide any educational advantage, either. "Wooo! we have laptops instead of textbooks! Now we've signifigantly reduced the pool of good material with which we can teach. And we've made it harder for our students to study by giving them their information in a medium they cannot annotate, forcing them to study in places where electricity is readily available and where it's OK to pull out a laptop, and put their educational materials at the mercy of every piece of malware on the planet." Great job, guys.
There is an amazing amount of research that goes into figuring out what the best teaching methods are. Why is it that schools seem to largely ignore this, and chase after random fashions instead? Why don't we expect the people who teach our children to think critically to think critically themselves? Why are we wasting our precious education dollars with abandon?
Cocoa-Java apps are _not_ cross-platform. About the only advantages I could see getting from it is not having to make your developers learn Objective-C and being able to work in a garbage-collected environment.
But I don't think either of those advantages are great enough to make it worth Apple's while to spend money on maintaining Cocoa bindings for Java. Objective-C is really not difficult to learn, and has plenty of syntactic sugar to keep you happy - especially if you're using Apple's runtime. And reference counting isn't perfect, but it's also almost brainless to use after a few days of really getting used to it.
Much better in my opinion for Apple to put their Java efforts into trying to keep the JRE on OS X up to date, and possibly to put a bit more effort into getting it to run well.
The interesting thing about his examples - Mozilla, Apache, KDE, Gnome, Linux - is that all five of them are largely developed by full-time paid employees.
Those two-bit Milli Vanilli animatronic weenies didn't play their own instruments.
This guy is way ahead of them. He's had a guitar-playing robot in his band for years.
Maybe you're looking for one of the many devices that utilize write-only memory?
There are plenty of companies that have tried to come out with something comparable to Photoshop, but at a much lower price. Two things are working against them - first, they have a hard time breaking into the low cost photo editing realm because they have to compete with the name recognition of Photoshop CS, and, increasingly, the cheapness of the GIMP (which I have noticed seems to be breaking into the mainstream).
But, for the part that you want, which is to be just as featureful as Photoshop, the big reason why there aren't any cheap players is that any company that would come out with a serious competitor would have to catch up with an industry-standard program put out by the biggest (and probably the richest) player in the field, and which has been in development for 18 years now.
Heaven knows how many person-years worth of programmer time you'd have to pay for to develop a serious competitor, but it's definitely not something you're going to pull off without either already being a large software development firm, or having a large amount of venture capital (good luck on that last one). Either way, in order to break even, you're still going to have to set the price way above the $300 mark in order to pay the bills. There simply aren't enough photographers and digital artists out there to generate enough sales to generate a profit at a lower price.
Right. But it doesn't use anywhere near 10% as much power when the CPU is only running at 10%.
And it consumes a hell of a lot less power than one desktop running at 10% and a second high-powered computing cluster.
If it leads to making better use of the computers the world already has rather than building new ones, noxious chemicals and all, I'm all for it.
Is that the Windows market is oversaturated. I'm going to suggest that the number of commercial software developers a platform can support is related logrithmically to its user base. Given how massive the Wintel platform's market share is, there is just no room for a small shareware developer looking to break into the market.
Just do a Tucows or Download.com search for _anything_. You'll find about 30 other apps, many of them freeware. And frequently a couple of them will be huge well-established behemoths. Omni would have been insane to make OmniGraffle a Windows-only program with Visio already there. Go do the same searches on the Apple secion of VersionTracker, and you won't find nearly as much stuff, and frequently a bunch of it will have only half the features you want.
And the games market for Macs is so tiny that you can write almost anything and bet that you will get at least some following. There's a Mac-only MMORPG that, technology-wise, is far far behind anything else on the market, but it still manages to keep a loyal community even in the face of games like World of Warcraft.
(Of course, that's probably because there also seem to be a lot of cheapskate, half-assed Mac gamers like me who were unsure about paying $50 for the game PLUS $10-15/mo subscription (My Sirius radio cost less than that!) when we know there's a good chance we would get bored and quit 3 or 4 months into it when that price including startup costs still works out to $30 or so a month. And when we saw that the minimum specs were way above what we had sitting on our desks, that was the nail in the coffin. The shaky, half-assed attempt to get back on topic moral: If you write Mac games, make sure they will run on well-mildewed hardware. On average, Mac users let their computers age much longer than PC users do (I've heard twice as long quoted a few times), and there are not many among them who are the kind to buy a new computer just to be able to play the latest game. If we really cared about games anywhere near that much, we never would have ditched Windows in the first place.)
Apple has always been rather behind in releasing Java versions.
Apple does not develop Java. Sun does.
I was actually thinking about my Mac. I generally avoid Java on Linux for anything other than applets because I can get native programs that integrate better with my desktop and don't suck up all my RAM (my Linux box is aging).
Wait. . . I think you basically just said, "Folks want to get the best person for the job for as little pay as possible, and that is exaclty why they don't care how good of a person for the job you are."
WTF!?
Or maybe a bunch of us still complain about Java's slowness because it _is_ slow if you don't happen to be running it on a Windows box.
What's the point of a "platform-independent platform" if it's really only meant to run well on one platform?
Science has recently discovered that circles may be slightly different from squares!
Also, water freezes if you get it cold enough!
(Seriously, is anybody who has really sat down and thought about brains and digital computers at all surprised by this?)
In other words, maybe there's been a bit of a backslide over the past couple years, but I think that overall most games have improved quite a bit since, say, King's Quest I.
Though I do wish the adventure game genre would return to popularity. LucasArts used to make some really excellent games.
Seriously. If you don't have a need to worry about appearances (i.e., she's not taking it to corporate meetings), stickers (lots of them) go a long way. Thieves who aren't just stealing it for their own personal use will think twice about stealing anything that is easily identifiable because it would be easy to pick out at a pawn shop, and black-market type folks aren't going to want something that stands out so much. Thieves are generally looking for a quick buck, so they generally aren't going to be interested in scraping all those stickers off, either.
Also, in addition to writing down serial numbers, write down her MAC address (both the ethernet and the wireless if she has both). If it does get stolen, hand them off to the school's computer center. I know of two separate cases where students stole school computers, and were caught within a day the moment they plugged the thing into the network and turned it on. Hopefully they would be willing to do such a thing for your daughter in the event that such a thing happens.
But the single most important thing you can do is make sure that she locks her door and, if she has a ground floor room, keeps the windows closed when she's out. A lot of people I knew at college thought they didn't need to because folks around the dorm would keep an eye on things or something like that, but it just isn't true. There were several cases at my school (which only had 1,100 students) where someone from outside the college just walked into the dorms while classes were in session, tried doors, and walked out with the expensive stuff from the rooms with unlocked doors. If they walked in on someone, they would just make an excuse to the effect of, "Sorry, wrong room." And act like they were visiting someone and don't really know their way around very well yet.
And it's not exactly related to electronics, but, if she uses a purse, get her to quit. Otherwise, she's going to get sick of lugging it around at a party or while she's hunting for books at the library and she'll leave it next to the coat pile or in her study cubby, only to come back and find it gone.
It seems like this keyboard only gives you the power to make your situation worse.
On a normal keyboard, with the keys staggered, each finger can reach five keys easily - the one it's hovering over, and the two above and two below it.
On this fancy one, they have the keys arranged in a grid (which is the only other basic key pattern I can think of when you're working with a flat surface). In this situation, each finger can only reach three keys easily. And I fail to see what advantage straight up and down motion has over up and to the side a bit.
Other than that, I think the difference is just the angle of the keys with respect to your hand or body. I always figured it would be sufficient (and about $160 cheaper) to turn the keyboard. It's for gaming - you're only using one hand, anyway.
Now, if it were about 10 years ago and you wanted to make one of these with two or four separate pads on which you could arrange the keys so that several people could work from the same logical keyboard device for all those old multiple-players-on-the-same-screen games where you had to share the keyboard with your buddies, then we'd be talking.
I find it rather amusing that the keyboard is called "Ergodex," but in the photo the guy who is using it has his wrist folded back on itself, which is supposedly one of the worst no-nos in input device ergonomics.
(Forgive me if I get this entirely wrong; I don't use Windows much.)
I thought that there were some major Microsoft programs, such as VisualStudio, that expect to be run as Administrator.
I concur, but why bother with the fireproof safe? I really doubt that a DVD-R could survive the heat that transfers through the safe given that they can't survive direct sunlight very well, either. Best to make sure that the really important stuff is in two different physical locations and hope that they aren't both burned down at the same time.
Also, you should periodically make new copies of both DVDs. I have some CD-Rs that haven't lasted three years, and I doubt that DVDs last as long, given the higher data density.
I think that's been done because all attempts to use neural nets in chess computers (that I know of, anyway) have not been particularly successful.
But then, possibly this is because there hasn't been as much effort put into neural approaches.