A bunch of vapor. Try reading about Taligent. Basically Apple did the cardinal mistake of wanting to replace MacOS X with a committee driven OS developed together with IBM. Unsurprisingly the effort never went anywhere.
I guess you do not know the history of Microsoft against Digital Research. Microsoft purposely crippled Windows so it would not run on DR-DOS at one time. This sabotage strategy was detailed in leaked Microsoft memos which were trialed on the Microsoft antitrust case, which Microsoft lost. Microsoft also exerted an extraordinary amount of power to displace Netscape from the desktop, much like they displaced BeOS before. Microsoft likes to threaten vendors with MS Windows/Office license hikes in case they also sell competing products. They also, at one point, wanted all the PC vendors to pay them a fee for every PC they sold regardless of it came installed with Windows or not.
Microsoft never learned to interact with other people. They only know how to take things but not how to give back. I also think that it is wrong to think that MS is engineer driven. MS is management driven more than anything else. Their current CEO used to be a product manager and Proctor & Gamble and their former CEO was a college dropout. How can such a company be engineer driven? This is a far cry from a company like HP or Google.
I never quite got why so many people are allergic to command lines. The greatest revolution in the web was reintroducing the command line in the form of the search bar. You can see search based interfaces on everything today including Windows 7 and iOS. Linux systems today are also auto-configuring to such a large extent I seldom have to configure anything at all. I still remember when I had to manually generate the X11 configuration. Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.
I haven't had to find device drivers or recompile kernels for about 5 years now. Perhaps you should just try a modern Linux distribution. If you want to view all forms of media just install VLC. I see people on Windows and MacOS X using it as well.
I have replaced the applications I use on Windows with open source versions. If it wasn't for games I would have left the Windows platform a long time ago.
There used to be a time when one person could understand the entire machine. I had a C64. It came with a single instruction manual which described the hardware board, the chip interrupts, and how to program in BASIC (which came built in). Today things are not that simple anymore. This means people are increasingly turned off by computers. Even computer "experts" usually only know a narrow niche. There are few generalists with good all around knowledge.
As computers get more mobile they are also turning more into fashion. This evolution is natural. It happened with every single accessory we use.
The next revolution will happen when people get programmable electronics which are powerful enough to satisfy their computing needs, and they can manufacture the rest of the components using 3D printing, desktop CNC machines or whatever. Then the cycle which happened with the onset of personal computers will begin all over again.
The hardware support is not significantly worse than that of MS Windows. Windows works worse on old hardware than Linux, and Linux works worse on new hardware than Windows.
That is what Ruby on Rails and Django are supposed to be about. There is no GUI builder but the code is pretty minimal. Also there are plenty of databases more lightweight than MySQL. If you just want to embed a database into a desktop app you can use SQLite.
I also have to admit that MS manages to make pretty good tools for developing these sorts of business apps. C# is pretty good at it.
Africa has way worse issues than the IMF. One is a lack of confidence in technology and a deep belief in plain nonsense. Another is the large number of crippling endemic diseases like malaria and yellow fever. The short lifespans resulting from these diseases, famine, and wars, mean it is harder to retain a highly trained workforce.
What Africa needs is the same thing that was done in Europe and Asia. Large scale landscaping. The swamps near population centers must be dried and the mosquitoes which transmit most of these diseases eradicated. Drinking water must be filtered and decontaminated to prevent cholera. Rivers need to be dammed to prevent flooding. Of course you are not going to hear this from the WWF.
This means you need 2874.375 million acres if you used soybeans to grow the same amount of fuel. Which is 4.491 million square miles. Well the US has a land area of 3.794 million square miles. So even if you razed the entire US and turned it into a giant soybean field you would not be able to manufacture enough oil.
This is just something I wrote on the back of a napkin. I did not include the higher volumetric energy density of biodiesel as a factor in the calculations. But I did not include the fertilizer manufacturing costs either. Nor did I add the other uses of petroleum to these calculations.
You can use other things than soybean oil. Like peanuts, rapeseed, or jatropha. But you will still need to devote more land area to fuel production than the total land area used for farming in the US to produce this amount of fuel. Crop fuels can only supply a fraction of the total demand.
If you use crop fuels you will need to reduce fuel consumption, reduce the number of cars and miles driven, or use some other measure of rationing the supply. Since we live in a market economy this simply means the price of fuel will rise a lot. The middle class would likely stop being able to own cars.
The end result is that what you will see in the market, if we run out of conventional petroleum, will be oil made from tar sands, natural gas to liquids, coal to liquids, or some other cheap fuel. Not vegetable oil.
Gas turbines with that level of efficiency are built using different construction techniques so they can run at a higher temperature. Since it is for a stationary application you can afford making the turbine very heavy. You can also use more fragile ceramics which do not handle the vibrations of a moving vehicle very well. Then they are cooled using water cooling towers. They are basically using a river as a cooling source.
In a car you cannot use such cooling mechanisms. You basically use air cooling. You cannot make the engine too heavy because you will decrease mileage per gallon.
Try checking out the operational range for vehicles with gas turbines like the M1 and T-80 tanks versus the Leopard 2 and T-84 tanks which use regular diesel engines.
It is not impossible to do a viable turbine car. But it will probably have to be a hybrid in order to reduce idle power fuel consumption, use more advanced lightweight construction materials and techniques.
It would make your sedan's fuel consumption put an HMMWV to shame. Regular diesel engines can also run on peanut oil. In fact that was the fuel Diesel himself used to demonstrate his engine. Gasoline engines can be easily modified to also run on ethanol. The issue with peanut oil, ethanol, or indeed any other fuel made from biomass is that you cannot make enough fuel to run the cars we use today even if you replaced all current farmland to produce fuel instead. So you propose to solve the problem by increasing fuel consumption even further? Madness.
In order for turbines to be successful someone needs to increase their efficiency further.
C++ streams suck. Operator overload is mostly useful for things that arguable should come built-in with the language such as complex numbers and matrix math.
Just like vandalism, one way to deter it is to make it easier to reverse the damage, than to cause it in the first place. These are computers we are talking about here. If the problem is software based, filter the attacker, use versioned filesystems and revert the changes.
I tried avoiding it like the plague because I have been grown up on GUI applications and did not want to go for a non-WYSIWYG word processing platform. That was until I had to write a 100 page document in MS Word. Word kept constantly trying to reformat the document. If I did document editing across different machines, which had slightly different print settings, MS Word reformatted the document every time too. Then there were the crashes. Plus the hard to recover binary format documents. Luckily I made multiple frequent backups or otherwise I could have had totally lost my work several times.
It was so bad I actually considered using a desktop publishing program like Adobe InDesign instead. But the desktop publishing programs just did not handle text like I needed them to.
I used to use Visio with Adobe Illustrator for the diagrams but I now use a combination of Dia and Inkscape instead.
If you write long technical documents it is well worth the effort to learn LaTeX. pdflatex can import PNG, JPEG, EPS and PDF graphics.
This is an issue if you are going to do collaborative document editing. But if your client just needs to read the file, you can just give him a PDF. Most people have PDF readers installer. I am yet to find a business user which does not have it on his system.
As for word processors: if I need to write something short I use Google Docs or OoO Writer. If I need to write something with more than a couple of dozen pages I use LaTeX.
Oh please. Have you actually ever used Gnumeric? The charting ability beats the pants off the one in OoO Calc. The interface is much easier to use. Plus the interface is less clunky. People who actually care about numeric precision have tested spreadsheets and found Calc and Gnumeric to have better precision than Excel.
People get a lot of money selling leather handbags, jewelry and other similarly 'useless' items. This is not any different.
In the long term Apple will get dethroned when the people which are doing all the manufacturing work start selling on their own for cheaper. Samsung was already in the game and their products have been getting more compelling.
Oh and Apple hardware seldom is the best. What Apple is good at is system integration. It is the sum of the parts, rather than the parts themselves.
Commodore made chip design, manufactured chips, did board design, manufactured the boards, made the cases, made the OS, and sold the computers to the retail channel. They even made some applications.
Apple designs cases, designs the overall system, makes the OS. But they do no chip design. And they do not have their own manufacturing facilities for anything. It is all outsourced to someone in China or Korea.
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A bunch of vapor. Try reading about Taligent. Basically Apple did the cardinal mistake of wanting to replace MacOS X with a committee driven OS developed together with IBM. Unsurprisingly the effort never went anywhere.
I guess you do not know the history of Microsoft against Digital Research. Microsoft purposely crippled Windows so it would not run on DR-DOS at one time. This sabotage strategy was detailed in leaked Microsoft memos which were trialed on the Microsoft antitrust case, which Microsoft lost. Microsoft also exerted an extraordinary amount of power to displace Netscape from the desktop, much like they displaced BeOS before. Microsoft likes to threaten vendors with MS Windows/Office license hikes in case they also sell competing products. They also, at one point, wanted all the PC vendors to pay them a fee for every PC they sold regardless of it came installed with Windows or not.
Microsoft never learned to interact with other people. They only know how to take things but not how to give back. I also think that it is wrong to think that MS is engineer driven. MS is management driven more than anything else. Their current CEO used to be a product manager and Proctor & Gamble and their former CEO was a college dropout. How can such a company be engineer driven? This is a far cry from a company like HP or Google.
You never, ever have to go to the command line.
I never quite got why so many people are allergic to command lines. The greatest revolution in the web was reintroducing the command line in the form of the search bar. You can see search based interfaces on everything today including Windows 7 and iOS. Linux systems today are also auto-configuring to such a large extent I seldom have to configure anything at all. I still remember when I had to manually generate the X11 configuration. Today X11 automatically detects everything on startup, from your keyboard, to your graphics card, to your monitor. It also manages to do this with a much wider spectrum of hardware then the small sample MacOS X needs to deal with.
I haven't had to find device drivers or recompile kernels for about 5 years now. Perhaps you should just try a modern Linux distribution. If you want to view all forms of media just install VLC. I see people on Windows and MacOS X using it as well.
I have replaced the applications I use on Windows with open source versions. If it wasn't for games I would have left the Windows platform a long time ago.
There used to be a time when one person could understand the entire machine. I had a C64. It came with a single instruction manual which described the hardware board, the chip interrupts, and how to program in BASIC (which came built in). Today things are not that simple anymore. This means people are increasingly turned off by computers. Even computer "experts" usually only know a narrow niche. There are few generalists with good all around knowledge.
As computers get more mobile they are also turning more into fashion. This evolution is natural. It happened with every single accessory we use.
The next revolution will happen when people get programmable electronics which are powerful enough to satisfy their computing needs, and they can manufacture the rest of the components using 3D printing, desktop CNC machines or whatever. Then the cycle which happened with the onset of personal computers will begin all over again.
The hardware support is not significantly worse than that of MS Windows. Windows works worse on old hardware than Linux, and Linux works worse on new hardware than Windows.
I also have to admit that MS manages to make pretty good tools for developing these sorts of business apps. C# is pretty good at it.
Africa has way worse issues than the IMF. One is a lack of confidence in technology and a deep belief in plain nonsense. Another is the large number of crippling endemic diseases like malaria and yellow fever. The short lifespans resulting from these diseases, famine, and wars, mean it is harder to retain a highly trained workforce.
What Africa needs is the same thing that was done in Europe and Asia. Large scale landscaping. The swamps near population centers must be dried and the mosquitoes which transmit most of these diseases eradicated. Drinking water must be filtered and decontaminated to prevent cholera. Rivers need to be dammed to prevent flooding. Of course you are not going to hear this from the WWF.
Do the math. Soybeans have a yield of 48 gallons/acre per year.
The US uses 378 million gallons of gasoline per day.
378000000*365/48=2874375000
This means you need 2874.375 million acres if you used soybeans to grow the same amount of fuel. Which is 4.491 million square miles. Well the US has a land area of 3.794 million square miles. So even if you razed the entire US and turned it into a giant soybean field you would not be able to manufacture enough oil.
This is just something I wrote on the back of a napkin. I did not include the higher volumetric energy density of biodiesel as a factor in the calculations. But I did not include the fertilizer manufacturing costs either. Nor did I add the other uses of petroleum to these calculations.
You can use other things than soybean oil. Like peanuts, rapeseed, or jatropha. But you will still need to devote more land area to fuel production than the total land area used for farming in the US to produce this amount of fuel. Crop fuels can only supply a fraction of the total demand.
If you use crop fuels you will need to reduce fuel consumption, reduce the number of cars and miles driven, or use some other measure of rationing the supply. Since we live in a market economy this simply means the price of fuel will rise a lot. The middle class would likely stop being able to own cars.
The end result is that what you will see in the market, if we run out of conventional petroleum, will be oil made from tar sands, natural gas to liquids, coal to liquids, or some other cheap fuel. Not vegetable oil.
Oh and ethanol is even worse.
Gas turbines with that level of efficiency are built using different construction techniques so they can run at a higher temperature. Since it is for a stationary application you can afford making the turbine very heavy. You can also use more fragile ceramics which do not handle the vibrations of a moving vehicle very well. Then they are cooled using water cooling towers. They are basically using a river as a cooling source.
In a car you cannot use such cooling mechanisms. You basically use air cooling. You cannot make the engine too heavy because you will decrease mileage per gallon.
Try checking out the operational range for vehicles with gas turbines like the M1 and T-80 tanks versus the Leopard 2 and T-84 tanks which use regular diesel engines.
It is not impossible to do a viable turbine car. But it will probably have to be a hybrid in order to reduce idle power fuel consumption, use more advanced lightweight construction materials and techniques.
It would make your sedan's fuel consumption put an HMMWV to shame. Regular diesel engines can also run on peanut oil. In fact that was the fuel Diesel himself used to demonstrate his engine. Gasoline engines can be easily modified to also run on ethanol. The issue with peanut oil, ethanol, or indeed any other fuel made from biomass is that you cannot make enough fuel to run the cars we use today even if you replaced all current farmland to produce fuel instead. So you propose to solve the problem by increasing fuel consumption even further? Madness.
In order for turbines to be successful someone needs to increase their efficiency further.
It is all a matter of who has the most developer potential. All the rest is fluff.
DSL companies have been switching to fiber optic. At least the ones which know any better.
Depends on which assembly you are using. If it is X86 assembly, sure, it is baroque.
C++ streams suck. Operator overload is mostly useful for things that arguable should come built-in with the language such as complex numbers and matrix math.
Just like vandalism, one way to deter it is to make it easier to reverse the damage, than to cause it in the first place. These are computers we are talking about here. If the problem is software based, filter the attacker, use versioned filesystems and revert the changes.
I switched to LaTeX.
I tried avoiding it like the plague because I have been grown up on GUI applications and did not want to go for a non-WYSIWYG word processing platform. That was until I had to write a 100 page document in MS Word. Word kept constantly trying to reformat the document. If I did document editing across different machines, which had slightly different print settings, MS Word reformatted the document every time too. Then there were the crashes. Plus the hard to recover binary format documents. Luckily I made multiple frequent backups or otherwise I could have had totally lost my work several times.
It was so bad I actually considered using a desktop publishing program like Adobe InDesign instead. But the desktop publishing programs just did not handle text like I needed them to.
I used to use Visio with Adobe Illustrator for the diagrams but I now use a combination of Dia and Inkscape instead.
If you write long technical documents it is well worth the effort to learn LaTeX. pdflatex can import PNG, JPEG, EPS and PDF graphics.
This is an issue if you are going to do collaborative document editing. But if your client just needs to read the file, you can just give him a PDF. Most people have PDF readers installer. I am yet to find a business user which does not have it on his system.
As for word processors: if I need to write something short I use Google Docs or OoO Writer. If I need to write something with more than a couple of dozen pages I use LaTeX.
Oh please. Have you actually ever used Gnumeric? The charting ability beats the pants off the one in OoO Calc. The interface is much easier to use. Plus the interface is less clunky. People who actually care about numeric precision have tested spreadsheets and found Calc and Gnumeric to have better precision than Excel.
In the long term Apple will get dethroned when the people which are doing all the manufacturing work start selling on their own for cheaper. Samsung was already in the game and their products have been getting more compelling.
Oh and Apple hardware seldom is the best. What Apple is good at is system integration. It is the sum of the parts, rather than the parts themselves.
Commodore made chip design, manufactured chips, did board design, manufactured the boards, made the cases, made the OS, and sold the computers to the retail channel. They even made some applications.
Apple designs cases, designs the overall system, makes the OS. But they do no chip design. And they do not have their own manufacturing facilities for anything. It is all outsourced to someone in China or Korea.
It's the usual journalist sensationalist. Like the LHC is going to generate a black hole that will destroy our universe.
Plastic is low density. So it makes sense to bottle closer to the target market.