All very fine episodes, and obviously a staff writer will contribute to others' episodes. But that's just 3.3 episode credits. Conan was a contributor, but not a driving creative force.
George Meyer wrote or cowrote:
[7G13] The Crepes of Wrath
[7F07] Bart vs. Thanksgiving
[7F22] Blood Feud
[8F01] Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington
[8F02] Treehouse of Horror II
[8F15] Separate Vocations
[9F01] Homer the Heretic
[1F05] Bart's Inner Child
[AABF08] Sunday, Cruddy Sunday
[AABF22] Brother's Little Helper
[BABF19] Behind the Laughter
[CABF22] The Parent Rap
That's a much larger contribution. He's also probably got the most cameos on the show of any simpsons writer (he's the dirty looking bearded guy with the gilligan-style hat found in the unemployment line, in the writers' office at I&S studios, etc). And his tenure at the show is considerably longer.
But my best advice is to go here. It's an archive of a new yorker article profiling Meyer. Conan is a great, talented guy. But don't assume that just because he's the only famous name on the Simpsons writing staff that he's the funniest one.
good point -- it also had to do with
on
The Simpsons Movie
·
· Score: 2, Informative
the company hired to do the animation. I believe they only started using Akom (in Korea) for the animation during Season 2. That studio gave the show its current look.
Conan O'Brien is overrated
on
The Simpsons Movie
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
as a Simpsons writer. While he's a brilliant talk-show host and did some good writing for the Simpsons, he is far too often given all the credit for the Simpsons' golden years. I think if you look at the writing credits you'll see that George Meyer's presence on staff is more closely correlated with Simpsons quality. He is attached to the movie, according to comingsoon.net.
With that said, he came back to the show a few years ago and the show didn't get much better. So I still don't have very high hopes for this movie. The thing that made the Simpsons great was its loving, hilarious-yet-almost-plausible depiction of a small town and all of its quirky inhabitants. It stopped doing that a long time ago and started sending the main characters on ludicrous adventures crammed full of celebrity cameos -- in a nutshell, situational humor rather than character-based humor. It became just another cartoon. There have been ups and downs in quality, but I think it's pretty clear to everyone that the series has never been as good as it was during seasons 3-6.
I would like to believe that a feature length film would allow the series' greatest contributors to sit down and really focus on their craft again, and create a legacy that can be used to put the series to bed. More likely it will be used as an excuse for a plotline that's even more outlandish than usual. I'm not looking forward to it.
by just writing out the binary, performing the traditional operation and then converting back into your trit state? !3 = 0, !2 = 4...
it's internally consistent anyway, even if it doesn't make much sense. that may be all that's required for a system to work, though. obviously you wouldn't do all of this conversion, you'd just hardwire it.
But it brings back my conflicted position on Goldeneye. On the one hand, it introduced a lot of my friends to the FPS genre, and I'm glad I can play games against them now.
On the other hand, it's one of the worst multiplayer FPS's ever made. Unbearably slow, with ugly, undifferentiated levels, unbalanced weapons and impossible-to-see powerups, it was a miserable pain to play after having played quake 1 or even doom deathmatch. Try as I might I couldn't get my roommates in college to put down the N64 controller and play a real FPS.
In general, deathmatch in any FPS is incredibly fun -- so I guess to the uninitiated, deathmatch in 007 seemed like the greatest thing ever. I just wish I could've convinced them that it could be even better.
Please. Nobody pays attention to those things. If you want anyone to give a damn, take the time to write a letter. Submitting your email address to a website is not meaningful political speech.
I'd say every joe with xbox live has a PC wired for ethernet -- or nearly every one. I just don't buy that people get DSL or cable service solely for XBox Live. I think they get it for PC access -- which, aside from the small number of people who use USB modem interfaces, they do have an ethernet-capable PC.
Here in the realm of the *nix geek we're too used to dragging every drop of performance out of our ancient P200's. The fact is that most people technically sophisticated enough to want Xbox Live probably replace their PC every 2 or 3 years -- and in that window, their last PC probably already came with an onboard ethernet port.
look, did you buy broadband internet access solely for xbox live? no. you have a computer. stop pretending you don't. if anyone really wants to buy broadband access for XBL only, I'm sure MS will be happy to sell them an external hard drive add-on.
As for requiring windows -- hey, I'm not saying this is how it ought to be. I'm saying that's how it's likely to be. You think MS gives a shit that you want to run OSX? They don't. They're willing to give up that whopping 5% marketshare -- probably significantly less, since XB owners are likely to be gamers, and gamers are less likely to own macs due to a lack of games and the expense (gamer demographics presumably skew younger).
Look, I like apple, I love linux, I love having a hard drive on my modded xbox. None of those things have anything to do with what makes strategic business sense for XBox2. Pull your head out of the sand.
well, I didn't mean they'll do it manually. They just need to ship a cdrom w/ the xbox, or offer a download on xbox.com that opens up a customized smb share. Now, I certainly won't claim that this will *actually* be secure, but MS would at least make some motions in that direction.
Which brings up another good reason to remove the hard drive: to disable modding. So far the gamecube's piracy prevention scheme has been the most successful: proprietary disks (I know, there's a BBA-based exploit, but this is wayyy more painful to do than loading a ripped game off a modded xbox's HDD). The XB2 shouldn't have any sort of native IDE support if MS wants to stop the XB hacking scene.
I agree they won't do a vanilla SMB share. probably some customized software you have to install that encrypts the data or otherwise hides it from the user.
I suspect you're right about an add-on HDD, but I doubt the ethernet will be an extra. The cost of putting a 100bt port on a motherboard has got to be pretty low these days -- and it opens a whole world of selling content w/o paying distribution costs.
the hard drive in the xbox serves three purposes. It isn't necessary for the two important ones.
Savegames. Flash memory would be more than sufficient.
Downloaded content from xbox live. This is a great feature -- but if you have live, you have broadband. And if you have broadband, you have a computer. All microsoft needs to do is require you to open up a windows share where XBL can put its downloaded content. This would be perfectly adequate for most people. Could even be used by them to push their mediaPC platform (ugh).
Storing ripped music for use as a soundtrack. Wanting to do this doesn't mean you already have a broadband connection and computer, so some people would lose out. Those with BB/LAN could use a windows share for this, too. I don't think this is a popular enough feature to mandate its inclusion in XBox2. An external harddrive peripheral could fill this need.
Remember, MS has said they can't make XBox 1 profitable. You can bet they are going to try to drive down their hardware costs with XB2 so that they can actually make some money. The harddrive is a big expense that could be dispensed with without too much pain.
call them. They will pay attention to whatever form of communication you choose, but:
- email is worst -- they get tons, a lot is just dashed off, and they are frequently mailbombed by issue advocacy groups
- the US post in and out of the Capitol is greatly delayed since the anthrax scares. The latency involved has made letters earn less attention than they used to. Again, volume is a problem.
- phone calls are your best bet. You'll get somebody to talk to, and demand a portion of the staff's finite attention.
league nights. Send flyers to local businesses that have a lot of young, nerdy employees; get them to join teams. Offer a mandatory coed league to get some women in the door (via guys cajoling their gfs into playing), and to open up the window to newbies.
Go oldschool(ish): there are a lot of people who played goldeneye but have no idea what WASD means. Get them in the door. Then sell them on a Halo tournament. Then provide a free hour one weeknight where people can try games they haven't played before (with handicapping on for the pros).
Basically, aim low -- there are a lot of people who've played games before, enjoyed it, but didn't make it a hobby. You can convert them. You just need to ease them into it.
That's what I'd value most -- a gaming spot that can actually stay afloat for more than 6 months.
This means you have to appeal to more people than just the slashdot crowd. Have a bar/lounge area with unobtrusively placed consoles. GET A LIQUOR LICENSE. Sure, keep it accessible to the kiddies as much as possible. But don't be afraid to go 21+ at 10 or 11 on a friday night. I don't think it's likely that you will make your money on the games -- try to cover costs with them, but make your profit on drinks, food and coffee.
Get a few TVs to show sports on. Run a madden tournament on monday nights during the football season (and other appropriate games during other sports seasons, although the MNF tie-in is probably more likely to be lucrative). Anything to get non- or casual gamers in the door.
Cause sure, I'd go there. But could I convince my girlfriend and friends to come along? Friends who don't even know what an LPB is? If it's a big room filled with beige boxes playing counterstrike and a Jolt machine in the corner, the answer is going to be no, and you're going to be stuck with a much smaller clientele.
when I did some work in a NN lab in undergrad most other labs were using matlab for their simulations. We used a home-rolled C++ app, but used matlab for all the analysis. it's pretty essential for NN stuff as things stand today (unless they've changed considerably in the last year or two)
why would MS open themselves to liability when they have hordes of programmers at their disposal? For a small(ish) low priority project like this it would be much much cheaper for a company like MS to just devote a few spare resources to it than to run the risk of stealing.
First: point taken on the mud-hut issue. I stand by my point, though, that there is much more -- let's call it investment latency, I'm sure there's a real econ term for it -- in getting money back from dollars spent in Bangalore than there is from dollars spent in the valley.
The scenario you outline is exactly why we need to act now, while our economy remains a powerhouse. The yawning trade gap tells us that we're sending much more money overseas than we're getting from them. The world still need us more than we need them.
So let's say SAP is going to sell their software here for 75% of the cost of IBM's, which was produced using American labor at wages that can support a middle class. The solution to this competitive disparity is not say "it was fun while it lasted" and tell those IBM engineers that they can always get jobs in the service industry, serving tacos to other ex-engineers. It's to slap a 33% tariff on SAP until they can certify that they're paying all of their workers and all their subcontractors' workers a fair wage while maintaining environmental and human rights standards.
Frankly, I don't see how unrestricted trade can work without a single world government -- and I don't think we'll be seeing that anytime soon. Otherwise some country can always game the system with subsidies, lax human rights or environmental policies, artificial manipulation of the exchange rate, etc.
To bring things back to the slashdot level, it's like being a network of trusted vs. untrusted clients. Ideally everyone's trusted and things operate with maximum efficiency. In this case, it's a pipe dream. Inefficient safeguards like tariffs must be introduced to prevent untrustworthy participants from sending everything to hell.
(1) You're right; I'm not sure. But I suspect that for a viable IT market to emerge, you need a broad array of well-developed industries that need to manage customer interaction, or employ a lot of knowledge workers.
Basically, there needs to be a demand for moving a lot of bits around. I suspect India is several stages of economic development away from that point. Bangalore IT money is not going to go into VC funds, it's going to go into houses and infrastructure improvements. Necessary prerequisites for the emergence of a native Indian IT market, I grant you.
In the meantime the US IT business is being devastated. Here's where (2) comes in. There is no long-term in this industry -- it's still in its infancy. There's no guarantee that US tech industry dominance will always exist. We're already sending away chip fab, customer service and software engineering. Don't think it can happen? Look at steel. Look at consumer electronics. Look at automobiles. All of these industries have either fallen into a sleepy trailing position, or are in serious trouble.
I agree that the system will operate most efficiently without trade restrictions. Corporate profits will be maximized, and the supply of labor will always more than meet demand. But efficiency is all capitalism promises. It's not an end in itself; it needs to be harnessed to improve people's lives. And, sorry to say it, but we have no imperative to improve foreign economies when it comes at the cost of our own.
I'm all for loosening visa and citizenship quotas, but I strongly oppose sending american money overseas in these circumstances -- it makes companies richer for a little while, workers poorer immediately, and may end up taking America out of a high-tech leadership position.
I realize protectionism is not a viable long-term strategy. I don't want to steal the potential for economic development from nations transitioning to an advanced economy.
But here's the problem: we are growing production capacity without growing the markets to support them. Everyone would be getting rich and improving their quality of life in this equation if there was a demand from within India for IT work. There isn't one to speak of.
Without such markets to support the expanded production capacity, the benefits of globalization are realized only for corporations -- and they are short-lived. The net money going to workers drops as companies utilize cheaper labor. By shipping capital out of the country to foreign workers who will not inject it back into the corporations' native economy, that economy will suffer, people won't be able to afford services and the corporations will collapse.
The corporations are not really to blame. This is irresistable poison fruit. If they don't take it, they will starve long before their competitors die from the toxicity of the practice.
Protectionist measures are not a permanent solution, but they MUST be put back into place to slow the bleeding. They can slowly be relaxed as foreign markets expand and produce consumers to support their industries.
The hard truth is that there is no shortcut to developing a nation's economy. To do it right takes a slow process. Otherwise all you get is short term corporate enrichment, the establishment of unsustainable foreign labor markets, and the destruction of local economies and cultures.
I think I was pretty clear in saying that I believe in Dr. Varadarajan's expertise. I'm sure he knows lots more about supercomputing than I do or ever will (although: don't assume I'm an idiot. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to be familiar with the types of simulations supercomputers can be used for).
My point is that the video was silly; a point you don't refute. Instead you justify Apple patronizing its partisans -- make no mistake, that video was for Macworld, not Joe Blow. It was dumbing things down for the most technically sophisticated mass audience Apple is likely to produce a video for. With this sort of attitude, how am I supposed to take seriously any of the apple camp's claims to technical superiority? If Apple is feeding us this sort of junk argument, how can I take any of their supposedly objective technical claims seriously?
This goes to the root of the problem with Apple: they assume they know what's best for you. Fortunately, they usually do. Their interface design is great and they consistently make good hardware choices. But if you are going to make choices for the consumer, I think you need to be open about why you made those choices. And putting out ignorant junk like "we make the only supercomputing platform that you can check email on" is just nonsense any way you slice it (I've got Pine going on my Cray upstairs, and let me tell you, it hauls -- okay, not really).
I didn't mean to insult Dr. Varajarajan (he's your faculty adviser, right? it's okay, you can tell us). I am sure he went on at length about the system and Apple cut out all of the worthwhile parts. That doesn't make the email comment any less funny, though.
Look, I don't like the Patriot Act either, and I certainly oppose Patriot II. But the story submission is deliberately misleading. Patriot II was never a bill up for consideration on the floor of either legislature. It was leaked from internal DOJ memos, and the DOJ says it was just theoretical work. Still disturbing, I grant you, but nobody every proposed it as legislation.
Second, calling car dealerships et al's capacity as financial institutions into doubt is disingenuous. These places issue loans -- some of them quite large. If a terrorist goes to Car Dealership A, obtains a loan, sells that car to Car Dealership B and puts the money toward Nefarious Purposes, maybe we should know about that. Even moreso if one guy has done it 20 times in 6 months.
Personally I feel that there should be mandatory notification when these records are surrendered, and requests should have to go before a judge. But the author of this story is painting everything in black and white.
was how the project leader kept saying it was nice to have a supercomputer running an OS he can check his email on.
I'm sure he knows his stuff, but this seemed like just about the most assinine justification for a supercomputer design that I've ever heard. Thinking back (I just watched this during Jobs' keynote), I can't remember ever hearing what exactly they were planning to use this for. I know it'll get put to a lot of research uses, but maybe they could have talked about some of those. As it stands, the only thing I know this will be used for is really, really, really fast spam filtering.
I find that difficult to believe. Apple has big advantages in the consumer space where interface and ease of use are a big deal. In the server space you have professionals setting things up and interface is irrelevant. There is *no way* this will beat Apache on commodity hardware in performance or stability for the money.
Slashdot Mirror
Conan O'Brien wrote or cowrote:
All very fine episodes, and obviously a staff writer will contribute to others' episodes. But that's just 3.3 episode credits. Conan was a contributor, but not a driving creative force.
George Meyer wrote or cowrote:
That's a much larger contribution. He's also probably got the most cameos on the show of any simpsons writer (he's the dirty looking bearded guy with the gilligan-style hat found in the unemployment line, in the writers' office at I&S studios, etc). And his tenure at the show is considerably longer.
But my best advice is to go here. It's an archive of a new yorker article profiling Meyer. Conan is a great, talented guy. But don't assume that just because he's the only famous name on the Simpsons writing staff that he's the funniest one.
the company hired to do the animation. I believe they only started using Akom (in Korea) for the animation during Season 2. That studio gave the show its current look.
With that said, he came back to the show a few years ago and the show didn't get much better. So I still don't have very high hopes for this movie. The thing that made the Simpsons great was its loving, hilarious-yet-almost-plausible depiction of a small town and all of its quirky inhabitants. It stopped doing that a long time ago and started sending the main characters on ludicrous adventures crammed full of celebrity cameos -- in a nutshell, situational humor rather than character-based humor. It became just another cartoon. There have been ups and downs in quality, but I think it's pretty clear to everyone that the series has never been as good as it was during seasons 3-6.
I would like to believe that a feature length film would allow the series' greatest contributors to sit down and really focus on their craft again, and create a legacy that can be used to put the series to bed. More likely it will be used as an excuse for a plotline that's even more outlandish than usual. I'm not looking forward to it.
it's internally consistent anyway, even if it doesn't make much sense. that may be all that's required for a system to work, though. obviously you wouldn't do all of this conversion, you'd just hardwire it.
On the other hand, it's one of the worst multiplayer FPS's ever made. Unbearably slow, with ugly, undifferentiated levels, unbalanced weapons and impossible-to-see powerups, it was a miserable pain to play after having played quake 1 or even doom deathmatch. Try as I might I couldn't get my roommates in college to put down the N64 controller and play a real FPS.
In general, deathmatch in any FPS is incredibly fun -- so I guess to the uninitiated, deathmatch in 007 seemed like the greatest thing ever. I just wish I could've convinced them that it could be even better.
more likely both: looks to me like a hastily written filter to prevent slashdotting
Please. Nobody pays attention to those things. If you want anyone to give a damn, take the time to write a letter. Submitting your email address to a website is not meaningful political speech.
Here in the realm of the *nix geek we're too used to dragging every drop of performance out of our ancient P200's. The fact is that most people technically sophisticated enough to want Xbox Live probably replace their PC every 2 or 3 years -- and in that window, their last PC probably already came with an onboard ethernet port.
As for requiring windows -- hey, I'm not saying this is how it ought to be. I'm saying that's how it's likely to be. You think MS gives a shit that you want to run OSX? They don't. They're willing to give up that whopping 5% marketshare -- probably significantly less, since XB owners are likely to be gamers, and gamers are less likely to own macs due to a lack of games and the expense (gamer demographics presumably skew younger).
Look, I like apple, I love linux, I love having a hard drive on my modded xbox. None of those things have anything to do with what makes strategic business sense for XBox2. Pull your head out of the sand.
Which brings up another good reason to remove the hard drive: to disable modding. So far the gamecube's piracy prevention scheme has been the most successful: proprietary disks (I know, there's a BBA-based exploit, but this is wayyy more painful to do than loading a ripped game off a modded xbox's HDD). The XB2 shouldn't have any sort of native IDE support if MS wants to stop the XB hacking scene.
I suspect you're right about an add-on HDD, but I doubt the ethernet will be an extra. The cost of putting a 100bt port on a motherboard has got to be pretty low these days -- and it opens a whole world of selling content w/o paying distribution costs.
Remember, MS has said they can't make XBox 1 profitable. You can bet they are going to try to drive down their hardware costs with XB2 so that they can actually make some money. The harddrive is a big expense that could be dispensed with without too much pain.
call them. They will pay attention to whatever form of communication you choose, but: - email is worst -- they get tons, a lot is just dashed off, and they are frequently mailbombed by issue advocacy groups - the US post in and out of the Capitol is greatly delayed since the anthrax scares. The latency involved has made letters earn less attention than they used to. Again, volume is a problem. - phone calls are your best bet. You'll get somebody to talk to, and demand a portion of the staff's finite attention.
are going to be models with gigantic hands
Go oldschool(ish): there are a lot of people who played goldeneye but have no idea what WASD means. Get them in the door. Then sell them on a Halo tournament. Then provide a free hour one weeknight where people can try games they haven't played before (with handicapping on for the pros).
Basically, aim low -- there are a lot of people who've played games before, enjoyed it, but didn't make it a hobby. You can convert them. You just need to ease them into it.
This means you have to appeal to more people than just the slashdot crowd. Have a bar/lounge area with unobtrusively placed consoles. GET A LIQUOR LICENSE. Sure, keep it accessible to the kiddies as much as possible. But don't be afraid to go 21+ at 10 or 11 on a friday night. I don't think it's likely that you will make your money on the games -- try to cover costs with them, but make your profit on drinks, food and coffee.
Get a few TVs to show sports on. Run a madden tournament on monday nights during the football season (and other appropriate games during other sports seasons, although the MNF tie-in is probably more likely to be lucrative). Anything to get non- or casual gamers in the door.
Cause sure, I'd go there. But could I convince my girlfriend and friends to come along? Friends who don't even know what an LPB is? If it's a big room filled with beige boxes playing counterstrike and a Jolt machine in the corner, the answer is going to be no, and you're going to be stuck with a much smaller clientele.
when I did some work in a NN lab in undergrad most other labs were using matlab for their simulations. We used a home-rolled C++ app, but used matlab for all the analysis. it's pretty essential for NN stuff as things stand today (unless they've changed considerably in the last year or two)
why would MS open themselves to liability when they have hordes of programmers at their disposal? For a small(ish) low priority project like this it would be much much cheaper for a company like MS to just devote a few spare resources to it than to run the risk of stealing.
First: point taken on the mud-hut issue. I stand by my point, though, that there is much more -- let's call it investment latency, I'm sure there's a real econ term for it -- in getting money back from dollars spent in Bangalore than there is from dollars spent in the valley.
The scenario you outline is exactly why we need to act now, while our economy remains a powerhouse. The yawning trade gap tells us that we're sending much more money overseas than we're getting from them. The world still need us more than we need them.
So let's say SAP is going to sell their software here for 75% of the cost of IBM's, which was produced using American labor at wages that can support a middle class. The solution to this competitive disparity is not say "it was fun while it lasted" and tell those IBM engineers that they can always get jobs in the service industry, serving tacos to other ex-engineers. It's to slap a 33% tariff on SAP until they can certify that they're paying all of their workers and all their subcontractors' workers a fair wage while maintaining environmental and human rights standards.
Frankly, I don't see how unrestricted trade can work without a single world government -- and I don't think we'll be seeing that anytime soon. Otherwise some country can always game the system with subsidies, lax human rights or environmental policies, artificial manipulation of the exchange rate, etc.
To bring things back to the slashdot level, it's like being a network of trusted vs. untrusted clients. Ideally everyone's trusted and things operate with maximum efficiency. In this case, it's a pipe dream. Inefficient safeguards like tariffs must be introduced to prevent untrustworthy participants from sending everything to hell.
Basically, there needs to be a demand for moving a lot of bits around. I suspect India is several stages of economic development away from that point. Bangalore IT money is not going to go into VC funds, it's going to go into houses and infrastructure improvements. Necessary prerequisites for the emergence of a native Indian IT market, I grant you.
In the meantime the US IT business is being devastated. Here's where (2) comes in. There is no long-term in this industry -- it's still in its infancy. There's no guarantee that US tech industry dominance will always exist. We're already sending away chip fab, customer service and software engineering. Don't think it can happen? Look at steel. Look at consumer electronics. Look at automobiles. All of these industries have either fallen into a sleepy trailing position, or are in serious trouble.
I agree that the system will operate most efficiently without trade restrictions. Corporate profits will be maximized, and the supply of labor will always more than meet demand. But efficiency is all capitalism promises. It's not an end in itself; it needs to be harnessed to improve people's lives. And, sorry to say it, but we have no imperative to improve foreign economies when it comes at the cost of our own.
I'm all for loosening visa and citizenship quotas, but I strongly oppose sending american money overseas in these circumstances -- it makes companies richer for a little while, workers poorer immediately, and may end up taking America out of a high-tech leadership position.
I realize protectionism is not a viable long-term strategy. I don't want to steal the potential for economic development from nations transitioning to an advanced economy.
But here's the problem: we are growing production capacity without growing the markets to support them. Everyone would be getting rich and improving their quality of life in this equation if there was a demand from within India for IT work. There isn't one to speak of.
Without such markets to support the expanded production capacity, the benefits of globalization are realized only for corporations -- and they are short-lived. The net money going to workers drops as companies utilize cheaper labor. By shipping capital out of the country to foreign workers who will not inject it back into the corporations' native economy, that economy will suffer, people won't be able to afford services and the corporations will collapse.
The corporations are not really to blame. This is irresistable poison fruit. If they don't take it, they will starve long before their competitors die from the toxicity of the practice.
Protectionist measures are not a permanent solution, but they MUST be put back into place to slow the bleeding. They can slowly be relaxed as foreign markets expand and produce consumers to support their industries.
The hard truth is that there is no shortcut to developing a nation's economy. To do it right takes a slow process. Otherwise all you get is short term corporate enrichment, the establishment of unsustainable foreign labor markets, and the destruction of local economies and cultures.
My point is that the video was silly; a point you don't refute. Instead you justify Apple patronizing its partisans -- make no mistake, that video was for Macworld, not Joe Blow. It was dumbing things down for the most technically sophisticated mass audience Apple is likely to produce a video for. With this sort of attitude, how am I supposed to take seriously any of the apple camp's claims to technical superiority? If Apple is feeding us this sort of junk argument, how can I take any of their supposedly objective technical claims seriously?
This goes to the root of the problem with Apple: they assume they know what's best for you. Fortunately, they usually do. Their interface design is great and they consistently make good hardware choices. But if you are going to make choices for the consumer, I think you need to be open about why you made those choices. And putting out ignorant junk like "we make the only supercomputing platform that you can check email on" is just nonsense any way you slice it (I've got Pine going on my Cray upstairs, and let me tell you, it hauls -- okay, not really).
I didn't mean to insult Dr. Varajarajan (he's your faculty adviser, right? it's okay, you can tell us). I am sure he went on at length about the system and Apple cut out all of the worthwhile parts. That doesn't make the email comment any less funny, though.
Second, calling car dealerships et al's capacity as financial institutions into doubt is disingenuous. These places issue loans -- some of them quite large. If a terrorist goes to Car Dealership A, obtains a loan, sells that car to Car Dealership B and puts the money toward Nefarious Purposes, maybe we should know about that. Even moreso if one guy has done it 20 times in 6 months.
Personally I feel that there should be mandatory notification when these records are surrendered, and requests should have to go before a judge. But the author of this story is painting everything in black and white.
I'm sure he knows his stuff, but this seemed like just about the most assinine justification for a supercomputer design that I've ever heard. Thinking back (I just watched this during Jobs' keynote), I can't remember ever hearing what exactly they were planning to use this for. I know it'll get put to a lot of research uses, but maybe they could have talked about some of those. As it stands, the only thing I know this will be used for is really, really, really fast spam filtering.
I find that difficult to believe. Apple has big advantages in the consumer space where interface and ease of use are a big deal. In the server space you have professionals setting things up and interface is irrelevant. There is *no way* this will beat Apache on commodity hardware in performance or stability for the money.