A modern MacBook has no mouse buttons since it is multitouch. They are simply the best mouse pad on any laptop currently available.
My feeling having gone the other way some time back is that a MacBook is the cheapest way of getting a decent UNIX laptop with all the hardware working, plus the hardware is well built and the OS works nicely. You can even run Linux on a MacBook if you really want to go that route. The build quality of most PC laptops is so poor that you end up paying just as much for a good Windows laptop to run Linux as you would buying a MacBook.
The spectrum wasn't really relevant as a programmer's machine. Sure, it was popular but most people who had one never wrote so much as a single line of code and Sinclair BASIC was primitive. Better than on the 81 but still pretty lousy and your code had to be full of GOTO statements. The Spectrum and C64 were both much the same, a game platform and not relevant to computer literacy in the way the BBC and the cheaper sibling the Electron were.
As for saying few homes had BBC micros, that is far from the truth. Most of my friends had them, there were plenty of hobby mags for them and lots of software. Compare the mags of the time between platforms and say Acorn User had much more depth than Sinclair User did.
In the end though, the important point is that neither the C64 nor Spectrum did much for future programmers and were mostly about consuming software, not creating it so I guess they were more like the modern PC than the BBC was however much I dislike where we've ended up.
It depends on where you were living I guess. I was in the UK at the time and my school got the first computer in the county in 1979 - a Commodore Pet 3008. That was the first machine I learned to program but the Commodore BASIC was feeble at best. A year later I bought a Sinclair ZX80 and then 81 and really got stuck into programming. The BASIC wasn't much better than Commodore though and I wanted more than the '81 could offer so was looking at the VIC20 (still that nasty BASIC) and then the 64 which was very crippled by the BASIC so most interaction with the machine had to be done through PEEK and POKE commands which resulted in really opaque code.
Around the same time though, the BBC started their Computer Literacy Project and authorised Acorn Computers to rebrand their new Proton as the BBC Microcomputer System. The BBC Basic was astounding for the time with full structured programming languages and an inline assembler for performance. BBCs were very fast for the time with much better graphics than even the Commodore 64 but that wasn't the best thing, it was all the connectivity, expandability and the power of the thing. The BBC Micro was the machine that British schools took up in their droves and all kids going through school in the '80s would have used them. I got one myself and kept using it for the best part of a decade. I still have it and it still works. It launched me into a career programming and the language skills BBC Basic enabled have been relevant even today as a Java/C coder.
The Commodore 64 certainly sold in great numbers, but it was more a consumer machine and didn't really turn out programmers like the BBC did. The 64 was more of an also ran in the UK market although it did keep going for a long time but it was basically seen as a games computer and little more.
The funny thing is that today, with the standardisation on the Windows PC in schools, pupils are coming out of school less computer literate than they were in my day because they get taught to use applications (Office mostly) rather than programming. The ideals of the BBC Computer Literacy Project have pretty much been lost with the move to the Windows PC.
20 years ago when I was working with transputers we use Occam. It was a very pure parallel programming language and it wasn't too difficult. However, writing parallel code meant starting from scratch (getting rid of the dusty decks of old algorithms as my professor described it). However, this never really happened and we've ended up with primitive parallelisation nailed on to sequential code. The are many parallel architectures, SIMD, MIMD, distributed memory, shared memory and combinations of them all and none of the languages currently available really suit. You have basic multithreading and MPI bolted on to old sequential languages and developers trying to take algorithms which absolutely must proceed in order and trying to find sections they can perform in parallel. This isn't going to get you good performance or scalability. In Occam, we wrote procedures which were independent of each other and communicated over channels and all would be running at once. You wired them together and poured you data in at one end and results came out at the other. Due to the very fine grained parallelism it was extremely scalable - I hade code running on 80+ transputers at over 90% efficiency in 1990 and it would run happily on many more if I had them, and yet it also ran perfectly on one since serialisation of parallel programs is easy whereas parallelising serial code is very hard and inefficient. I find it sad that the current state of parallel programming is still so far behind where we were 20 years ago due to all this legacy stuff. Even when people start out with new algorithms, they still start with serial processes and then try and parallelise rather than considering the parallelism from the outset and designing the algorithm so it doesn't require everything in memory and doesn't produce different results when number of CPUs changes.
Equity is what you get when a small company can't afford to pay you the full market rate for your skills. You're gambling your current income against a future payout in the event that the company is successful. If they're paying you well and you're happy with that, you're really not in a position to ask for an equity stake. If you believe the company is going to be successful, buy some shares like any other investor would.
I've stopped watching new shows as a result of the cancellations of so many good shows. Now I only bother if it has a good run or completes. I only just started watching Lost. Futurama is excellent and I'm glad it has been renewed but it is a rarity that shows survive this long regardless of quality, especially shows that get cancelled and then come back.
Not watching new shows saves a lot of time and I guess I should thank those willing to waste their time getting into a new show with all the risk of cancellation and the disappointment associated.
Devices like the iPad are just holders and consumers of media. A Windows PC is the usual culprit when it comes to actually defeating copy protection and doing the duping. This seems bass ackwards to me as they should be taxing the computer, not that they should be taxing either.
"10" minimum - to comfortably read a page of text in landscape without zooming."
Reading isn't the issue - as others have pointed out you can read pages on a much smaller screen if the resolution is high enough and also if the device renders the page accordingly. However, try actually using a web site using a small touch screen and it is a different matter. On my iPad I can just get along with most pages when I use it in landscape mode but if it was any smaller I often wouldn't be able to hit links accurately without first having to zoom the page in. I sometimes have to do this on the iPad but it is thankfully rare but if the screen was smaller it would be much to frequent.
"Correct, but this toy does something very entertaining that the iPad can't, which is to stream and display video from the home network."
Funny, one of the main uses I have for my iPad is to stream video from my iTunes box. Sure, it's an app I bought called Air Video but it can do it and Apple is rumoured to be developing the AppleTV interface for the iPad too. It's a bit strong to say it can't do it when it clearly can although I'll concede that Apple should provide a solution themselves that works with iTunes directly. Mind you, Air Video also allows me to stream Flash video files directly to the iPad since the server side can convert them into h.264 so that works pretty well and I'll likely keep it around even if Apple provides a more direct video streaming solution for iTunes.
In terms of user experience, HD DVD is still better than Blu-ray simply because Blu-ray still takes so long to start a disc even on a modern machine. Picture and sound identical, interactivity definitely goes to HD DVD. Yes, I have a modern Blu-ray player which is profile 2.0 and yet it is still inferior to an HD DVD player from four years back. In fact I would give the win to HD DVD on the basis of it being region free.
An original AppleTV can run XBMC, supports add on HDs, and if you forego the wireless card you can add that Broadcom card that allows XBMC to play full 1080p and since it is over a wired network you can do it at decent bit rates so it will actually look like 1080p. Add to that the fact that it has both HDMI and component out so you can drive a TV and an HD projector like I do and you have a pretty awesome little box that plays anything you throw at it.
With that said, even a stock ATV (new or old) is a very convenient piece of kit if you have your media in iTunes, and if the new ATV gets app support it will likely get a port of the excellent Air Video which I currently use to stream all sorts of video to my iPad and does on the fly transcoding so even FLVs will play fine.
All that and you can rent stuff if you like but you don't have to since it will play you own media and it takes no time on a modern computer to rip your own DVDs to m4v.
Massive fail. Please be mindful that most people aren't like you and I'm not singling you out (not that you seem to realise) as my point is that the majority of people who drive cars do make the same journey as a bunch of other people and yet they still drive ludicrously large cars and carry no passengers and do sit in traffic jams. Where I live this is definitely the case as I see the same people every day as I ride past them. These are the people who should be using public transport or getting onto two wheels or car pooling.
This sort of thing comes up every time - someone pops up and has some very reasonable reason for not being able to use public transport or to car pool or to share their vehicle with others as is your case. However, you're the exception. City dwellers have no reasonably reason to drive a massive 4x4 to work every day that can barely manage 10 mpg and carry no passengers and simply contributes to the pollution and traffic chaos that we see every day.
Please be mindful of the notion that not everyone is just like you (and in fact very few are).
It really doesn't matter since they're all four wheel vehicles so are stuck in the same long queues so it isn't just about the seats since only one is in use most of the time anyway. In that case, you might as well use the most fuel efficient vehicle but it would be a whole lot better for the environment if you found a few friends who work in the same area as you who could share your car. Me, being on a motorcycle, well I get to go past all the people sitting in traffic jams as well as having fuel economy that would make a Prius driver weep not to mention it taking less than half the time to do my commute on the bike (30 mins) versus trying to do the same trip by car (>1 hour) or (horror) public transport (1.5 hours).
You get 2-5 inches (whatever the heck inches are) of snow all year around? I live in New Zealand so the only snow I see is up in the mountains so the bike works just fine and yet many many people still drive around in massive 4x4s (on their own as I said) and sit in terrible traffic jams. While it is true that some people have to deal with terrible weather there is no excuse in many parts of the world.
Most people do drive alone, even when their car can hold 7 or more people. I ride my motorcycle in to work every day and every day I drive past cars that could carry five or more people and if they were they would be as economical as my bike but the most they ever have is two people and that is rare. If people really wanted to be environmentally friendly they would stop driving around in big tin boxes (and fewer of those around would make the roads a lot safer for those of us on two wheels anyway).
I saw Avatar at the cinema in RealD 3D and I found it distracting at best and it gave me a dreadful headache after an hour or so. Watching it again recently just off DVD on my 100" projection screen and enjoyed it a lot more. It wasn't as high res as the cinema and it wasn't 3D but despite that the experience was better.
The other issue I have with 3D is on TVs. Films shot fro 3D are shown on a really large screen and it works fine but if you shrink the screen down to domestic sizes, everything on the screen similarly gets scaled and the effect is really odd. I watched a demo on a 50" 3D set recently and it looked pretty good if you stood 1m away from the screen but any further away and the people on screen seemed to shrink down to the size of puppets. Very odd experience.
It is still a very capable machine and can run a currently supported OS (Leopard) as well as accepting a decent amount of RAM. If someone wants to get into Macs, a G5 tower isn't a bad way to do it as it is decently quick and most software is still compatible with PPC. It would give them at least a couple of good years desktop service and that would be far better than relegating it to being a server.
The funny thing is that their strong arm tactics work on the one hand because they discourage downloading - I certainly don't pirate music as a result. However, I don't tend to buy music these days either and I used to buy a lot. While they've reduced piracy they've also done untold damage to their revenue stream. Not good business.
Steam is a great model but it doesn't work that way for console games. For example, when I bought HL2 for the PC originally, I had to register with Steam to get the game to install and after that I didn't ever had to put the disc in the machine again. Recently I set up Steam on my Mac and it listed all the games I'd installed on that long gone PC and it downloaded the compatible games again for me. Sure, I can't really sell the game on but the benefit of redownloading for nothing is a decent trade. With the Xbox game, the download code only works once so if I delete it from my Xbox, that is it - gone. That is a big difference to me.
Heh heh, you're not kidding. I work the support desk for a specialist software company and I regularly get e-mail that essentially says 'I don't know enough to do my job and I don't want to do the leg work to find out myself, teach me'. I usually respond as nicely as I can and provide some information to give them a leg up but basically I point them at a bunch of reference sources for them to read and leave it at that. I'm here to support them, not educate them. I don't think they know the difference.
The only download game I bought was GTAIV-TLAD and almost as soon as I bought it they brought out the physical copy Episodes from Liberty City with that and the Ballad of Gay Tony on it. It was twice the price of the download but didn't require a large chunk of the disc space on my Xbox (20GB launch system) so I waited until one came up pre-owned cheap and picked that up. So, I've bought TLAD twice now. If I had bought a real disc I could sell it and get some money back but I can't. Great from the game publishers but crap for buyers. I won't do it again and in fact the vast majority of games I buy are preowned or discounted substantially such as Bioshock 2 bought brand new for half price. In 6 months or so I'll pick up Red Dead Redemption once all the fuss has died down and pre-owned copies hit the market at a decent price.
For me, if I had to buy games at full price I think I would stop buying them pretty much all together so none of my money would go into the industry - download games are just bad news.
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A modern MacBook has no mouse buttons since it is multitouch. They are simply the best mouse pad on any laptop currently available.
My feeling having gone the other way some time back is that a MacBook is the cheapest way of getting a decent UNIX laptop with all the hardware working, plus the hardware is well built and the OS works nicely. You can even run Linux on a MacBook if you really want to go that route. The build quality of most PC laptops is so poor that you end up paying just as much for a good Windows laptop to run Linux as you would buying a MacBook.
County, not country. School too.
The spectrum wasn't really relevant as a programmer's machine. Sure, it was popular but most people who had one never wrote so much as a single line of code and Sinclair BASIC was primitive. Better than on the 81 but still pretty lousy and your code had to be full of GOTO statements. The Spectrum and C64 were both much the same, a game platform and not relevant to computer literacy in the way the BBC and the cheaper sibling the Electron were.
As for saying few homes had BBC micros, that is far from the truth. Most of my friends had them, there were plenty of hobby mags for them and lots of software. Compare the mags of the time between platforms and say Acorn User had much more depth than Sinclair User did.
In the end though, the important point is that neither the C64 nor Spectrum did much for future programmers and were mostly about consuming software, not creating it so I guess they were more like the modern PC than the BBC was however much I dislike where we've ended up.
It depends on where you were living I guess. I was in the UK at the time and my school got the first computer in the county in 1979 - a Commodore Pet 3008. That was the first machine I learned to program but the Commodore BASIC was feeble at best. A year later I bought a Sinclair ZX80 and then 81 and really got stuck into programming. The BASIC wasn't much better than Commodore though and I wanted more than the '81 could offer so was looking at the VIC20 (still that nasty BASIC) and then the 64 which was very crippled by the BASIC so most interaction with the machine had to be done through PEEK and POKE commands which resulted in really opaque code.
Around the same time though, the BBC started their Computer Literacy Project and authorised Acorn Computers to rebrand their new Proton as the BBC Microcomputer System. The BBC Basic was astounding for the time with full structured programming languages and an inline assembler for performance. BBCs were very fast for the time with much better graphics than even the Commodore 64 but that wasn't the best thing, it was all the connectivity, expandability and the power of the thing. The BBC Micro was the machine that British schools took up in their droves and all kids going through school in the '80s would have used them. I got one myself and kept using it for the best part of a decade. I still have it and it still works. It launched me into a career programming and the language skills BBC Basic enabled have been relevant even today as a Java/C coder.
The Commodore 64 certainly sold in great numbers, but it was more a consumer machine and didn't really turn out programmers like the BBC did. The 64 was more of an also ran in the UK market although it did keep going for a long time but it was basically seen as a games computer and little more.
The funny thing is that today, with the standardisation on the Windows PC in schools, pupils are coming out of school less computer literate than they were in my day because they get taught to use applications (Office mostly) rather than programming. The ideals of the BBC Computer Literacy Project have pretty much been lost with the move to the Windows PC.
I once said we were wetting the baby's head while having pregnant sex. Didn't say that again......
20 years ago when I was working with transputers we use Occam. It was a very pure parallel programming language and it wasn't too difficult. However, writing parallel code meant starting from scratch (getting rid of the dusty decks of old algorithms as my professor described it). However, this never really happened and we've ended up with primitive parallelisation nailed on to sequential code. The are many parallel architectures, SIMD, MIMD, distributed memory, shared memory and combinations of them all and none of the languages currently available really suit. You have basic multithreading and MPI bolted on to old sequential languages and developers trying to take algorithms which absolutely must proceed in order and trying to find sections they can perform in parallel. This isn't going to get you good performance or scalability. In Occam, we wrote procedures which were independent of each other and communicated over channels and all would be running at once. You wired them together and poured you data in at one end and results came out at the other. Due to the very fine grained parallelism it was extremely scalable - I hade code running on 80+ transputers at over 90% efficiency in 1990 and it would run happily on many more if I had them, and yet it also ran perfectly on one since serialisation of parallel programs is easy whereas parallelising serial code is very hard and inefficient. I find it sad that the current state of parallel programming is still so far behind where we were 20 years ago due to all this legacy stuff. Even when people start out with new algorithms, they still start with serial processes and then try and parallelise rather than considering the parallelism from the outset and designing the algorithm so it doesn't require everything in memory and doesn't produce different results when number of CPUs changes.
Equity is what you get when a small company can't afford to pay you the full market rate for your skills. You're gambling your current income against a future payout in the event that the company is successful. If they're paying you well and you're happy with that, you're really not in a position to ask for an equity stake. If you believe the company is going to be successful, buy some shares like any other investor would.
I've stopped watching new shows as a result of the cancellations of so many good shows. Now I only bother if it has a good run or completes. I only just started watching Lost. Futurama is excellent and I'm glad it has been renewed but it is a rarity that shows survive this long regardless of quality, especially shows that get cancelled and then come back.
Not watching new shows saves a lot of time and I guess I should thank those willing to waste their time getting into a new show with all the risk of cancellation and the disappointment associated.
I don't know about Ford Perfect, but Ford Prefect may well have an issue with this.
Devices like the iPad are just holders and consumers of media. A Windows PC is the usual culprit when it comes to actually defeating copy protection and doing the duping. This seems bass ackwards to me as they should be taxing the computer, not that they should be taxing either.
"10" minimum - to comfortably read a page of text in landscape without zooming."
Reading isn't the issue - as others have pointed out you can read pages on a much smaller screen if the resolution is high enough and also if the device renders the page accordingly. However, try actually using a web site using a small touch screen and it is a different matter. On my iPad I can just get along with most pages when I use it in landscape mode but if it was any smaller I often wouldn't be able to hit links accurately without first having to zoom the page in. I sometimes have to do this on the iPad but it is thankfully rare but if the screen was smaller it would be much to frequent.
"Correct, but this toy does something very entertaining that the iPad can't, which is to stream and display video from the home network."
Funny, one of the main uses I have for my iPad is to stream video from my iTunes box. Sure, it's an app I bought called Air Video but it can do it and Apple is rumoured to be developing the AppleTV interface for the iPad too. It's a bit strong to say it can't do it when it clearly can although I'll concede that Apple should provide a solution themselves that works with iTunes directly. Mind you, Air Video also allows me to stream Flash video files directly to the iPad since the server side can convert them into h.264 so that works pretty well and I'll likely keep it around even if Apple provides a more direct video streaming solution for iTunes.
In terms of user experience, HD DVD is still better than Blu-ray simply because Blu-ray still takes so long to start a disc even on a modern machine. Picture and sound identical, interactivity definitely goes to HD DVD. Yes, I have a modern Blu-ray player which is profile 2.0 and yet it is still inferior to an HD DVD player from four years back. In fact I would give the win to HD DVD on the basis of it being region free.
An original AppleTV can run XBMC, supports add on HDs, and if you forego the wireless card you can add that Broadcom card that allows XBMC to play full 1080p and since it is over a wired network you can do it at decent bit rates so it will actually look like 1080p. Add to that the fact that it has both HDMI and component out so you can drive a TV and an HD projector like I do and you have a pretty awesome little box that plays anything you throw at it.
With that said, even a stock ATV (new or old) is a very convenient piece of kit if you have your media in iTunes, and if the new ATV gets app support it will likely get a port of the excellent Air Video which I currently use to stream all sorts of video to my iPad and does on the fly transcoding so even FLVs will play fine.
All that and you can rent stuff if you like but you don't have to since it will play you own media and it takes no time on a modern computer to rip your own DVDs to m4v.
Massive fail. Please be mindful that most people aren't like you and I'm not singling you out (not that you seem to realise) as my point is that the majority of people who drive cars do make the same journey as a bunch of other people and yet they still drive ludicrously large cars and carry no passengers and do sit in traffic jams. Where I live this is definitely the case as I see the same people every day as I ride past them. These are the people who should be using public transport or getting onto two wheels or car pooling.
This sort of thing comes up every time - someone pops up and has some very reasonable reason for not being able to use public transport or to car pool or to share their vehicle with others as is your case. However, you're the exception. City dwellers have no reasonably reason to drive a massive 4x4 to work every day that can barely manage 10 mpg and carry no passengers and simply contributes to the pollution and traffic chaos that we see every day.
Please be mindful of the notion that not everyone is just like you (and in fact very few are).
It really doesn't matter since they're all four wheel vehicles so are stuck in the same long queues so it isn't just about the seats since only one is in use most of the time anyway. In that case, you might as well use the most fuel efficient vehicle but it would be a whole lot better for the environment if you found a few friends who work in the same area as you who could share your car. Me, being on a motorcycle, well I get to go past all the people sitting in traffic jams as well as having fuel economy that would make a Prius driver weep not to mention it taking less than half the time to do my commute on the bike (30 mins) versus trying to do the same trip by car (>1 hour) or (horror) public transport (1.5 hours).
You get 2-5 inches (whatever the heck inches are) of snow all year around? I live in New Zealand so the only snow I see is up in the mountains so the bike works just fine and yet many many people still drive around in massive 4x4s (on their own as I said) and sit in terrible traffic jams. While it is true that some people have to deal with terrible weather there is no excuse in many parts of the world.
Most people do drive alone, even when their car can hold 7 or more people. I ride my motorcycle in to work every day and every day I drive past cars that could carry five or more people and if they were they would be as economical as my bike but the most they ever have is two people and that is rare. If people really wanted to be environmentally friendly they would stop driving around in big tin boxes (and fewer of those around would make the roads a lot safer for those of us on two wheels anyway).
He expects people to pay for his mind numbing biassed reporting? Nope. Don't think so.
I saw Avatar at the cinema in RealD 3D and I found it distracting at best and it gave me a dreadful headache after an hour or so. Watching it again recently just off DVD on my 100" projection screen and enjoyed it a lot more. It wasn't as high res as the cinema and it wasn't 3D but despite that the experience was better.
The other issue I have with 3D is on TVs. Films shot fro 3D are shown on a really large screen and it works fine but if you shrink the screen down to domestic sizes, everything on the screen similarly gets scaled and the effect is really odd. I watched a demo on a 50" 3D set recently and it looked pretty good if you stood 1m away from the screen but any further away and the people on screen seemed to shrink down to the size of puppets. Very odd experience.
It is still a very capable machine and can run a currently supported OS (Leopard) as well as accepting a decent amount of RAM. If someone wants to get into Macs, a G5 tower isn't a bad way to do it as it is decently quick and most software is still compatible with PPC. It would give them at least a couple of good years desktop service and that would be far better than relegating it to being a server.
The funny thing is that their strong arm tactics work on the one hand because they discourage downloading - I certainly don't pirate music as a result. However, I don't tend to buy music these days either and I used to buy a lot. While they've reduced piracy they've also done untold damage to their revenue stream. Not good business.
Steam is a great model but it doesn't work that way for console games. For example, when I bought HL2 for the PC originally, I had to register with Steam to get the game to install and after that I didn't ever had to put the disc in the machine again. Recently I set up Steam on my Mac and it listed all the games I'd installed on that long gone PC and it downloaded the compatible games again for me. Sure, I can't really sell the game on but the benefit of redownloading for nothing is a decent trade. With the Xbox game, the download code only works once so if I delete it from my Xbox, that is it - gone. That is a big difference to me.
Heh heh, you're not kidding. I work the support desk for a specialist software company and I regularly get e-mail that essentially says 'I don't know enough to do my job and I don't want to do the leg work to find out myself, teach me'. I usually respond as nicely as I can and provide some information to give them a leg up but basically I point them at a bunch of reference sources for them to read and leave it at that. I'm here to support them, not educate them. I don't think they know the difference.
The only download game I bought was GTAIV-TLAD and almost as soon as I bought it they brought out the physical copy Episodes from Liberty City with that and the Ballad of Gay Tony on it. It was twice the price of the download but didn't require a large chunk of the disc space on my Xbox (20GB launch system) so I waited until one came up pre-owned cheap and picked that up. So, I've bought TLAD twice now. If I had bought a real disc I could sell it and get some money back but I can't. Great from the game publishers but crap for buyers. I won't do it again and in fact the vast majority of games I buy are preowned or discounted substantially such as Bioshock 2 bought brand new for half price. In 6 months or so I'll pick up Red Dead Redemption once all the fuss has died down and pre-owned copies hit the market at a decent price.
For me, if I had to buy games at full price I think I would stop buying them pretty much all together so none of my money would go into the industry - download games are just bad news.