I'm talking about growth, not absolute sales numbers. Apple's numbers grow faster than the computer market does; that's what "Apple's market share grows" means. Apple's share of the pie, compared with the whole pie, grows. Apple occupies bits of the market that were previously occupied by someone else. Where Apple started from is irrelevant. People don't buy from a company because the company's market share isnt in equilibrium with all other companies' market shares.
As for the default update thing: That still won't help them much on platforms that aren't Windows. I don't know whether the Silverlight runtimes for OS X and Linux are final yet, but Microsoft doesn't just need to have the runtime ready, it also needs to have it actually installed on most PCs. Either that or they go with either Flash or plain HTML for their advertising pages because both of those are safe to assume on an exec's PC.
Maybe the GP wants a way of putting people into space that doesn't involve rockets. A giant catapult maybe? If we'd breed stronauts that can withstand acceleration forces of, say, 200g, space exploration would be much easier.
It's a Markov chain-based spam bot (aka "a Markov bot"). You feed it with text and it learns sentence fragments, from which it then generates sentences. These are used in spam (to try and get around Bayes filters) and occasionally on Slashdot. I have no idea what's the idea behind using a Markov bot to spam/. - it's an excessive amount of work for a post that will get downmodded quickly.
With Apple's market share growing as fast as it does (even in corporate environments) there's also the question of whether using Silverlight before all platforms have solid support for it is a good idea at all. Microsoft is going to have a hard time convincing companies that access their site from a non-Windows environment to switch to Windows using nothing but a frame that says "Download the Silverlight client for Windows XP and Vista to watch this content".
Simple: One of the big carriers is too old to be fitted with the new chips as it faces decommission as a museum. When the bad guy shuts down almost all ships in the galaxy, this old ship is reactivated and sets out along with the few ships that weren't destroyed. Lead by the carrier's scruffy old commander and a teacher suffering from cancer, the remaining humans set out to find Earth.
Seriously, what did you expect how this scheme is foiled? What I described is SOP for this situation.
I'm studying CS at a German university and Macs are essentially taking over the department. The Sun lab was discarded in favor of an Apple lab and I'd say that Apple is the most popular choice for laptops with Lenovo as the second; lecturers are even more Apple-friendly than the students. Dell and HP don't come near.
"Quad-core 3.0" implies a Mac Pro (as the G5 never reached 3 GHz) - where the power of the GPU depends on what you tell Apple to give you. Admittedly, the current best gaming GPU they offer is a Geforce 8800 with 512 MiB of RAM, but it's still going to play the newest games for a while, even if not at the highest settings.
Also, The Mac Pro uses PCIe slots. It should be possible to upgrade a Mac Pro to the biggest GPU currently offered by Apple as long as your copy of OS X is updated and a trip to any large Apple community would surely uncover someone's experience in putting the latest and greatest post-BTO GPU into a Mac Pro.
Buying a new computer because an interchangable component of the only modular Mac on the market isn't powerful enough for you isn't a very smart decision.
I meant management and not, as you imply, management. Of course management in theory is the job of management, but we both know that management and management don't always mix. So, in short, I meant management, not management.
Actually, if iPods weren't so darn expensive I'd choose one for two reasons: Rockbox supports them rather well, latest-gen models excluded, and unlike most other Rockbox-supported players you can actually still find iPods on eBay. Rockbox supports a plethora of audio formats including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and C64 SIDtunes and has a (very) experimental MikMod port; it hardly gets better than that. I don't care about fashion statements, I want a DAP that plays the music from Last Ninja.
Of course all DAPs supported by Rockbox are either very expensive or impossible to obtain, so I ended up buying a Nintendo DS and a homebrew module running MoonShell. Don't know what kind of statement that sends but it plays MP3, Ogg Vorbis and NDS cartridges, which is almost as good as chiptunes.
<apple-ad>I'm Jesus_666 and I'm a geek.</apple-ad>
Looks like a Markov bot to me. I think it reads Slashdot posts, cuts them into pieces and glues those pieces back together in order to generate a more or less convincing post.
Note how it wrote "(Score:-)" once. To me it looks like the bot read the score from a post and mistook it for actual content; the colon is the end of the fragment and since colons don't occur too often in Slashdot posts the most likely token to begin with a colon is a smiley.
There definitely is some kind of supervision going on, though; the bot clearly expresses some opinions, mostly anti-Bush and pro-conspiracy theory. Of course it might be possible that this comes from Slashdot having an anti-Bush bias, but I don't think that it's that extreme; also, conspiracy theorists usually end up flamed and ridiculed, so a truly random bot would rather toss around random flames instead of chemtrail theories.
I think the most likely explanations are both related to the bot being trained selectively - either on posts with certain views (so the bot ends up emulating them) or on very long posts (so the bot builds up a useful set of sentence fragments quickly). The latter would explain the bias towardy kookery*; kooks tend to write very long posts, even though not all long posts are kooky.
* Note that I don't think that anti-Bush sentiments are kooky; chemtrail theories are, however. That and only few people still insist that Gore is/was the US president.
It's "Stasi", with two s. "Stasi" is an abbreviation for "Staatssicherheit", as in "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" ("Ministery for State Security").
By the way, don't "Ministery for State Security" and "Department of Homeland Security" sound awfully similar? I don't know whether the DHS's name is unfortunate or just cynical...
The issue with the USA is simple: They are way too old! The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, said Thomas Jefferson. This didn't happen in the States for a long time so it's no wonder the tyrants conned the patriots into joining forces against everyone else...
Everyone knows what that term means. Perhaps the GP used it without even quotes because he assumed that everyone perceived it as not an euphemism but rather a synonym for genocide.
You do know that plutonium can be used as a nuclear fuel? If it couldn't it would be useless for nuclear weapons.
Breeder reactors, reprocessing facilities and smart management can be used to dramatically reduce the amount of nuclear waste you have to dispose of - the figures I usually hear are somewhere between 95 and 98%. Also, nuclear plants don't constantly release radioactive particles like coal plants do. And they generate a lot of power. And the more modern designs are very safe; even Chernobyl required a risky test in an old reactor design conducted by a night shift crew that was unsufficiently trained.
Green power doesn't quite deliver as of yet. Photovoltaics still has a rather low efficiency and creates toxic waste during production of the panels. Hydro doesn't scale well, apart from dramatically changing the river you're working with. Geothermal only works in certain places. Wind also only works in certain places, doesn't generate that much power and is suspected to disturb bird populations and people living downwind.
The big question is: What do we do now? We can't go nuclear because that would mean we generate a few tons of nuclear waste per year that we have to bury for a few decades, apart from theoretically enabling teh nukes. We can't go coal because apart from CO2 emissions coal generates some nuclear waste as well. We can't go solar because solar doesn't generate enough power for most places and is toxic. We can't go wind and water either because they can't keep up with demand. We can't scale back our energy consumption either because that would be just as unacceptable as nuclear waste to most people.
At some point we do need to make an unpopular choice because there aren't any popular ones. I think that nuclear is one of the better choices we can make.
Actually, that's my entire point. VM versus non-VM has nothing to do with it; it's all about standardization. I expect.NET and its VM to remain what Objective-C is: A language that can be (and is) used everywhere but only really makes sense on its home OS. It'll be a bit better because unlike ObjC people on other platforms actually care about.NET, but it's not going to be the next C for a long time.
As for the GCC breakage issues: Those are GCC issues, not general C/C++ issues. Even C99 is almost a decade old now.
I just thought of a particular anti-smoking spot and how it might apply to Microsoft:
The prairie. A herd of sad-looking Steve Ballmers run across the plains until they finally come to an abandoned campsite where several notebooks lie on the ground. In the background plays "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone" by Paula Cole.
Fade to black. Text appears: "The future kills." Another line: "Let's just pretend it's 1995 again, okay?" And in small font at the bottom of the screen: "This ad was sponsored by Microsoft."
It's not hard to imagine, but only if the VM is a relatively static target. It's possible to write a compiler against a published standard that won't change for ten or so years but much harder to write against a format that might change every few years whenever the sole developer decides to extend the platform.
Once Microsoft gives up its sole control over.NET and hands it over to ISO (and sticks to whatever ISO does with the platform) we might see.NET become an industry-wide basic standard much like C is now. But as long as.NET remains a business asset I think it's not going to happen.
Given that we're talking about Microsoft they will probably make the new API also point to the compatibility libraries because either they couldn't finish the new framework on time (see the Vista featureset) or it'd be too slow (see Vista being based on.NET).
They do have a chance of making Windows 7 great, but after seeing all their recent developments being neither the savior some anticipated, nor the devil incarnate others anticipated but instead solid mediocrity... Let's just say I think it's safe to assume more of the same for Windows 7.
You might want to look into mineral wool, though. That stuff is much cheaper than AAC walls (I'd say around 1.9 orders of magnitude) and it might help a bit with insulation.
It also has the advantage of not requiring the "this house is built for eternity and it will be passed unto the son of my son until the seventh generation" mindset.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm talking about growth, not absolute sales numbers. Apple's numbers grow faster than the computer market does; that's what "Apple's market share grows" means. Apple's share of the pie, compared with the whole pie, grows. Apple occupies bits of the market that were previously occupied by someone else. Where Apple started from is irrelevant. People don't buy from a company because the company's market share isnt in equilibrium with all other companies' market shares.
As for the default update thing: That still won't help them much on platforms that aren't Windows. I don't know whether the Silverlight runtimes for OS X and Linux are final yet, but Microsoft doesn't just need to have the runtime ready, it also needs to have it actually installed on most PCs. Either that or they go with either Flash or plain HTML for their advertising pages because both of those are safe to assume on an exec's PC.
Maybe the GP wants a way of putting people into space that doesn't involve rockets. A giant catapult maybe? If we'd breed stronauts that can withstand acceleration forces of, say, 200g, space exploration would be much easier.
It's a Markov chain-based spam bot (aka "a Markov bot"). You feed it with text and it learns sentence fragments, from which it then generates sentences. These are used in spam (to try and get around Bayes filters) and occasionally on Slashdot. I have no idea what's the idea behind using a Markov bot to spam /. - it's an excessive amount of work for a post that will get downmodded quickly.
Plus, of course, the little bit where you have to kill a bunch of astronauts if their rocket goes off course.
With Apple's market share growing as fast as it does (even in corporate environments) there's also the question of whether using Silverlight before all platforms have solid support for it is a good idea at all. Microsoft is going to have a hard time convincing companies that access their site from a non-Windows environment to switch to Windows using nothing but a frame that says "Download the Silverlight client for Windows XP and Vista to watch this content".
Oh, come on. It's just a very minor difference between "ASIC" and "iPod". It surely was just a typo.
Not to forget the CO2 given off by their bodies and the bodies of the animals whose meat they might eat.
Simple: One of the big carriers is too old to be fitted with the new chips as it faces decommission as a museum. When the bad guy shuts down almost all ships in the galaxy, this old ship is reactivated and sets out along with the few ships that weren't destroyed. Lead by the carrier's scruffy old commander and a teacher suffering from cancer, the remaining humans set out to find Earth.
Seriously, what did you expect how this scheme is foiled? What I described is SOP for this situation.
Wooo, anecdote battle!
I'm studying CS at a German university and Macs are essentially taking over the department. The Sun lab was discarded in favor of an Apple lab and I'd say that Apple is the most popular choice for laptops with Lenovo as the second; lecturers are even more Apple-friendly than the students. Dell and HP don't come near.
"Quad-core 3.0" implies a Mac Pro (as the G5 never reached 3 GHz) - where the power of the GPU depends on what you tell Apple to give you. Admittedly, the current best gaming GPU they offer is a Geforce 8800 with 512 MiB of RAM, but it's still going to play the newest games for a while, even if not at the highest settings.
Also, The Mac Pro uses PCIe slots. It should be possible to upgrade a Mac Pro to the biggest GPU currently offered by Apple as long as your copy of OS X is updated and a trip to any large Apple community would surely uncover someone's experience in putting the latest and greatest post-BTO GPU into a Mac Pro.
Buying a new computer because an interchangable component of the only modular Mac on the market isn't powerful enough for you isn't a very smart decision.
That's is the first sentence I've encountered where "effected" and "affected" are equally correct...
I meant management and not, as you imply, management. Of course management in theory is the job of management, but we both know that management and management don't always mix. So, in short, I meant management, not management.
Hope that clears things up.
Actually, if iPods weren't so darn expensive I'd choose one for two reasons: Rockbox supports them rather well, latest-gen models excluded, and unlike most other Rockbox-supported players you can actually still find iPods on eBay. Rockbox supports a plethora of audio formats including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and C64 SIDtunes and has a (very) experimental MikMod port; it hardly gets better than that. I don't care about fashion statements, I want a DAP that plays the music from Last Ninja.
Of course all DAPs supported by Rockbox are either very expensive or impossible to obtain, so I ended up buying a Nintendo DS and a homebrew module running MoonShell. Don't know what kind of statement that sends but it plays MP3, Ogg Vorbis and NDS cartridges, which is almost as good as chiptunes.
<apple-ad>I'm Jesus_666 and I'm a geek.</apple-ad>
Looks like a Markov bot to me. I think it reads Slashdot posts, cuts them into pieces and glues those pieces back together in order to generate a more or less convincing post.
Note how it wrote "(Score:-)" once. To me it looks like the bot read the score from a post and mistook it for actual content; the colon is the end of the fragment and since colons don't occur too often in Slashdot posts the most likely token to begin with a colon is a smiley.
There definitely is some kind of supervision going on, though; the bot clearly expresses some opinions, mostly anti-Bush and pro-conspiracy theory. Of course it might be possible that this comes from Slashdot having an anti-Bush bias, but I don't think that it's that extreme; also, conspiracy theorists usually end up flamed and ridiculed, so a truly random bot would rather toss around random flames instead of chemtrail theories.
I think the most likely explanations are both related to the bot being trained selectively - either on posts with certain views (so the bot ends up emulating them) or on very long posts (so the bot builds up a useful set of sentence fragments quickly). The latter would explain the bias towardy kookery*; kooks tend to write very long posts, even though not all long posts are kooky.
* Note that I don't think that anti-Bush sentiments are kooky; chemtrail theories are, however. That and only few people still insist that Gore is/was the US president.
It's "Stasi", with two s. "Stasi" is an abbreviation for "Staatssicherheit", as in "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" ("Ministery for State Security").
By the way, don't "Ministery for State Security" and "Department of Homeland Security" sound awfully similar? I don't know whether the DHS's name is unfortunate or just cynical...
The issue with the USA is simple: They are way too old! The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, said Thomas Jefferson. This didn't happen in the States for a long time so it's no wonder the tyrants conned the patriots into joining forces against everyone else...
Everyone knows what that term means. Perhaps the GP used it without even quotes because he assumed that everyone perceived it as not an euphemism but rather a synonym for genocide.
You do know that plutonium can be used as a nuclear fuel? If it couldn't it would be useless for nuclear weapons.
Breeder reactors, reprocessing facilities and smart management can be used to dramatically reduce the amount of nuclear waste you have to dispose of - the figures I usually hear are somewhere between 95 and 98%. Also, nuclear plants don't constantly release radioactive particles like coal plants do. And they generate a lot of power. And the more modern designs are very safe; even Chernobyl required a risky test in an old reactor design conducted by a night shift crew that was unsufficiently trained.
Green power doesn't quite deliver as of yet. Photovoltaics still has a rather low efficiency and creates toxic waste during production of the panels. Hydro doesn't scale well, apart from dramatically changing the river you're working with. Geothermal only works in certain places. Wind also only works in certain places, doesn't generate that much power and is suspected to disturb bird populations and people living downwind.
The big question is: What do we do now? We can't go nuclear because that would mean we generate a few tons of nuclear waste per year that we have to bury for a few decades, apart from theoretically enabling teh nukes. We can't go coal because apart from CO2 emissions coal generates some nuclear waste as well. We can't go solar because solar doesn't generate enough power for most places and is toxic. We can't go wind and water either because they can't keep up with demand. We can't scale back our energy consumption either because that would be just as unacceptable as nuclear waste to most people.
At some point we do need to make an unpopular choice because there aren't any popular ones. I think that nuclear is one of the better choices we can make.
Er, it's a 500 error, not 503. Although "out of resources" sounds quite appropriate.
I checked; CC has cached... the 503 error.
Actually, that's my entire point. VM versus non-VM has nothing to do with it; it's all about standardization. I expect .NET and its VM to remain what Objective-C is: A language that can be (and is) used everywhere but only really makes sense on its home OS. It'll be a bit better because unlike ObjC people on other platforms actually care about .NET, but it's not going to be the next C for a long time.
As for the GCC breakage issues: Those are GCC issues, not general C/C++ issues. Even C99 is almost a decade old now.
I just thought of a particular anti-smoking spot and how it might apply to Microsoft:
The prairie. A herd of sad-looking Steve Ballmers run across the plains until they finally come to an abandoned campsite where several notebooks lie on the ground. In the background plays "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone" by Paula Cole.
Fade to black. Text appears: "The future kills." Another line: "Let's just pretend it's 1995 again, okay?" And in small font at the bottom of the screen: "This ad was sponsored by Microsoft."
It's not hard to imagine, but only if the VM is a relatively static target. It's possible to write a compiler against a published standard that won't change for ten or so years but much harder to write against a format that might change every few years whenever the sole developer decides to extend the platform.
.NET and hands it over to ISO (and sticks to whatever ISO does with the platform) we might see .NET become an industry-wide basic standard much like C is now. But as long as .NET remains a business asset I think it's not going to happen.
Once Microsoft gives up its sole control over
Given that we're talking about Microsoft they will probably make the new API also point to the compatibility libraries because either they couldn't finish the new framework on time (see the Vista featureset) or it'd be too slow (see Vista being based on .NET).
They do have a chance of making Windows 7 great, but after seeing all their recent developments being neither the savior some anticipated, nor the devil incarnate others anticipated but instead solid mediocrity... Let's just say I think it's safe to assume more of the same for Windows 7.
You might want to look into mineral wool, though. That stuff is much cheaper than AAC walls (I'd say around 1.9 orders of magnitude) and it might help a bit with insulation.
It also has the advantage of not requiring the "this house is built for eternity and it will be passed unto the son of my son until the seventh generation" mindset.