Who would have thought this to be a novel way to rank people's skills?*
*I do realize that's not the upshot of the paper. Still, I think all this emphasis on Gaussian distributions for dividing people according to "skill" (read IQ, test scores, etc.) is a bit over done. Convenient, but overdone.
True, but in terms of a financial future, Apple's is certainly brighter in spite of their smaller market cap. Dell's business model inherently undercuts its financial stability. In order to stay competitive, they need to continue to cut costs. Pretty soon, cutting costs comes at the expense of things like customer service, R&D, and other things that are required to maintain a viable, growing business.
Apple has certainly come a long way since then. I think it's safe to say that we are comparing Apples to Apples in this case, since Apple was on the track to commoditization in the mid to late 1990s. However, when Jobs took over, they made a conscious decision to move away from commoditization and towards innovation as their primary driving force. What I think we're seeing here is the results of that decision. Had Apple continued down the path they had set out during Spindler/Amelio, they would have ended up like Dell -- perhaps a larger market share in the short term, but a much more dismal future outlook. Instead, they are a vibrant company that has great promise to grow its market share in a far more sustainable fashion.
Turning air 90 degrees is not silly at all. Anyone in HVAC knows that you lose 25% of your force (air-force?) with every 90 degree turn. Designing an HVAC for a house is a series of trade-offs -- you need to work around the available wall space and the desire to get the most out efficiency of your furnace or air conditioner.
No, it's more like telling radio and microwave tower operators to use white blinking lights instead of red ones because the red ones interfere with bird migration (really -- they do).
This sort of thing does not interfere with any sort of economic well-being, nor does it require a significant cost up front, like your analogy presumes.
I'm glad Mazda stepped it up. Rotary (aka Wankel) engines are actually better suited to hydrogen combustion than cylinder-based ones. In fact, IIRC, rotary engines can produce more horsepower running on hydrogen than on gasoline. On the downside, however, they still produce NOx emissions, something that fuel cells are much, much better at.
I'm sorry, I realize this is a non-scientific comparison, but this is anything but scientific. You're comparing a laptop, which likely has a 5400 rpm drive, to a desktop, which likely has a 7200 rpm drive. One of the major limiting factors at bootup is the disk. With so much seeking and reading going on, a difference in disk speed will be a huge hit to the laptop -- any laptop.
Also, comparing Mac OS X 10.3 to XP SP2 (as you failed to note in your original post) is also a bit bunk. Apple completely rewrote the boot sequence for 10.4 and, as a result, has dramatically decreased boot time.
Oh, and one more thing, you PowerBook has more memory. Memory tests happen at startup. The extra 256 MB of RAM may add a few seconds to the boot sequence.
I admit I'm an Apple fan, but we need to have a level playing field if we're going to compare these things.
I'm a big user of GIS, and while I find GRASS to be a wonderful alternative to ESRI products, it's sometimes too much hassle to fire up GRASS, define a region, import files, etc., if all I want to do is edit a shapefile or query a feature. I do know about QGIS and other alternatives, but sometimes it would be nice if ArcGIS was ported to the Mac. Given the change in landscape over the past couple of years and changes yet to come (Intel, I'm looking at you), I think there's more probability of these sorts of things happening. They are, however, still possibilities. Until a company commits to producing their specialized software (CADD, GIS, etc.) for the Mac, or until there is an increased demand for Macs in such industries, we're still just speculating.
Now, if Apple manages to wedge their way into the server market with a killer Intel-based Xserve coupled with a low-cost Xserve RAID, we may see those pressures come from another side. Time will tell.
Palm actually has an agreement with PalmSource to use the Palm OS in their devices until 2008 (or something close to then). For whatever reason, they didn't see fit to use Cobalt initially, and now that PalmSource has been focusing on Palm-on-Linux middleware, they're probably waiting for that to come out. Apps that run on Cobalt will run on POL, but they'll need a recompile. No sense in making your customers undergo two major OS changes in two years. They're probably also playing it safe since the sale of PalmSource to Access.
In any case, Palm appears to finally be positioning themselves as a device manufacturer that does some value-added stuff to whichever OS they are using. There are rumors floating around that there is Symbian version of the Treo. They're OS strategy seems to be one that will get them the most marketshare in various markets (smartphones and PDAs in the US, smartphones in EU, smartphones in Asia). My hope is that the Palm OS or POL doesn't get lost in the shuffle. I've used Windows Mobile a lot and still find Garnett a more attractive solution for what I need done.
Too bad they are loading it with Netscape 8 and not one of the better designed (graphically) Mozilla projects. It's like they took a book on bad interface design and puked out the GUI.
At least more people will be using the Gecko engine, which should help fight the standards black-hole that is IE.
"Hurricane Andrew? Why would you call a hurricane Andrew? Did the hurricane show up in a little cravat and a dickie, smelling of polo, sipping of perrier, going "Scurry, scurry, Andy's here!!!" What do they call tornado? Tornado. You get the message. They don't go,"Tornado Timmy's coming, FLEE!" Why, if they're going to give a hurricane a name, give it one that applies, like Hurricane Jesus-Christ-On-A-Crutch! Followed by the next big one, Hurricane Holy-Fucking-Moses!"
We'll see. IBM promised Steve 3 GHz in one year and didn't deliver. They've announced these chips, but give no indication as to when they'll be shipping in quantity. Could be the same as before.
Also, we don't know how compelling the roadmap looks in the future. Apple will get to use these chips in the short term and then switch to Intel by the time these chips have completed their "lives." Steve may be getting what he wants now, but he knows as well as you and I that it is not necessarily an indication of things to come.
My parents still live in what can be considered a "rural" area (only 4 miles from the city, but unreachable by DSL and the cable company has been too lazy). We're frustrated by the lack of broadband options, but recently we ran across the following article.
Basically, the guy plans on running a big WiFi transmitter on the unlicensed 2.4 GHz spectrum. How he can run a transmitter at that kind of power (7 mile range) and avoid the FCC is beyond me, but more power to him if he can (no pun intended). I recommend reading the article, as it sounds like a promising concept. I couldn't find any information on his company anywhere on the web aside from some city council minutes, so I'm a bit wary, but hopeful nonetheless. If he succeeds, expect this sort of thing to be rolled out where BPL would otherwise mess with a large portion of the spectrum.
I'm willing to bet it's in Flash because he did the presentation in Keynote. While the SWF export in Keynote isn't great, at least it preserves transitions, fonts, and other formatting options and doesn't look like shit (like the HTML export of another presentation software).
Plus, it takes one step to export. I haven't seen anything that will do that with CSS.
My question is, what sort of neutrality are we seeking here? "All providers of two-way communications." I fail to see how your internet service and your phone service are sufficiently similar. Maybe they should charge Motorola that tax for selling FRS radios. (sarcasm intended)
This is good news to hear. In a way, it confirms what I always suspected (especially since I keep my Macs longer than most of my equivalent PC friends -- and I'm a real gearhead). When you get down to it, though, I don't really care how much marketshare/install base Apple has, so long as they can keep cranking out the excellent products that they do.*
*Please keep in mind that I do realize the connection between profitability and new product development. All I'm saying is that the numbers could mean less as long as I'm a happy customer. And boy am I happy.
Because it won't be a product for very long. Other than for hackers and a few "must have everything" kids, I can't see this succeeding as a product. The number of qualifiers/caveats/limitations of this thing as mentioned in the FAQ are ridiculous. Want to play MP3s? You need to purchase special software. Oh, and the sound quality is limited to 128 K/s, so all those songs you ripped at higher quality won't work. Want to watch movies? Again, special software. To store anything, you'll need an SD or MMC card (not included) to boost the storage past the 32 MB. The game selection is bound to be limited as they are cartridge based and proprietary.
Oh, and one more thing: It's not cool. By the time kids will be able to use it, they'll be old enough to know they want an iPod/GameBoy SP/PSP/DS/etc. and not some childish thing from Mattel.
Exactly. You may lose some sales by making it available over the internet, but most people want to read a book in hand. Reading hundreds of pages at the computer screen is not my idea of fun (or comfort).
Besides, most of these academic presses end up selling books to libraries, who will always have a hard copy on hand in case people do want to read the physical copy. A good example of this can be seen in the academic journals available online. The journals are available in both electronic and hard copy at the same time.
That's because MS moved the site. I'm not sure why, except maybe that they wanted people to know that Terraserver was an MS thing (it's not like they can't fork over the $6 or so a year to renew the domain name).
Normally I'm skeptical of the market correcting the mistakes it makes, but this appears to be a case that might prove me wrong. The AOL-Time Warner merger sounded like a good idea on paper, but the two companies were already large enough that integrating their services and products was probably too great a hurdle, especially considering the time-frame under which it took place.
Either that or the combined company was horribly mismanaged.
This sounds normal
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 3, Informative
How is this different from any other OSS project? Two groups see the project going in two different directions and it forks. Granted, the Apple side on this one may not be as open as the KHTML people want, but in all honesty, I'm willing to bet that Apple has a much better code base than KDE at this point. The fact that Apple is suggesting a KDE backport of WebCore is pretty amazing. How many corporations do we see telling an OSS group, "Why don't you just take our code and use it for your project whole-hog"? My guess is not many.
There's some spammy/spyware like "iWon" thing wrapped in that link. It places a little "iWon" banner at the top of the NYT page, which of course links to some bullshit "iWon" page, which of course probably makes our friend prostoalex a bunch of money.
I'm not sure what else it does as I'm running OmniWeb on my Mac, but Windows users beware.
Someone pointed out an interesting series of relationships in a previous article on the whole Blu-Ray/HD-DVD brouhaha. I don't have a link to it, but I'll summarize"
Apple has now put their weight behind the Blu-Ray standard. That means Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro will support Blu-Ray authoring.
The porn industry uses FCP extensively. If they're anything like print houses (many of whom still use Quark 4.x), they will do anything to avoid changing their workflows. This means sticking with FCP and supporting Blu-Ray in a de facto sort of way.
I'm sorry, but we are almost to the point of living too long as it is. There are way, way, way better causes to put that kind of money up for. Besides, the only people who will benefit from this are the very rich, which if you think about it are probably the people who are putting this money up in the first place.
Vain bastards. Thank god most of Africa probably doesn't know about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Who would have thought this to be a novel way to rank people's skills?*
*I do realize that's not the upshot of the paper. Still, I think all this emphasis on Gaussian distributions for dividing people according to "skill" (read IQ, test scores, etc.) is a bit over done. Convenient, but overdone.
True, but in terms of a financial future, Apple's is certainly brighter in spite of their smaller market cap. Dell's business model inherently undercuts its financial stability. In order to stay competitive, they need to continue to cut costs. Pretty soon, cutting costs comes at the expense of things like customer service, R&D, and other things that are required to maintain a viable, growing business.
Apple has certainly come a long way since then. I think it's safe to say that we are comparing Apples to Apples in this case, since Apple was on the track to commoditization in the mid to late 1990s. However, when Jobs took over, they made a conscious decision to move away from commoditization and towards innovation as their primary driving force. What I think we're seeing here is the results of that decision. Had Apple continued down the path they had set out during Spindler/Amelio, they would have ended up like Dell -- perhaps a larger market share in the short term, but a much more dismal future outlook. Instead, they are a vibrant company that has great promise to grow its market share in a far more sustainable fashion.
Turning air 90 degrees is not silly at all. Anyone in HVAC knows that you lose 25% of your force (air-force?) with every 90 degree turn. Designing an HVAC for a house is a series of trade-offs -- you need to work around the available wall space and the desire to get the most out efficiency of your furnace or air conditioner.
No, it's more like telling radio and microwave tower operators to use white blinking lights instead of red ones because the red ones interfere with bird migration (really -- they do).
This sort of thing does not interfere with any sort of economic well-being, nor does it require a significant cost up front, like your analogy presumes.
I'm glad Mazda stepped it up. Rotary (aka Wankel) engines are actually better suited to hydrogen combustion than cylinder-based ones. In fact, IIRC, rotary engines can produce more horsepower running on hydrogen than on gasoline. On the downside, however, they still produce NOx emissions, something that fuel cells are much, much better at.
I'm sorry, I realize this is a non-scientific comparison, but this is anything but scientific. You're comparing a laptop, which likely has a 5400 rpm drive, to a desktop, which likely has a 7200 rpm drive. One of the major limiting factors at bootup is the disk. With so much seeking and reading going on, a difference in disk speed will be a huge hit to the laptop -- any laptop.
Also, comparing Mac OS X 10.3 to XP SP2 (as you failed to note in your original post) is also a bit bunk. Apple completely rewrote the boot sequence for 10.4 and, as a result, has dramatically decreased boot time.
Oh, and one more thing, you PowerBook has more memory. Memory tests happen at startup. The extra 256 MB of RAM may add a few seconds to the boot sequence.
I admit I'm an Apple fan, but we need to have a level playing field if we're going to compare these things.
My best answers at this point are. . .
We can only hope.
-and-
We'll have to wait and see.
I'm a big user of GIS, and while I find GRASS to be a wonderful alternative to ESRI products, it's sometimes too much hassle to fire up GRASS, define a region, import files, etc., if all I want to do is edit a shapefile or query a feature. I do know about QGIS and other alternatives, but sometimes it would be nice if ArcGIS was ported to the Mac. Given the change in landscape over the past couple of years and changes yet to come (Intel, I'm looking at you), I think there's more probability of these sorts of things happening. They are, however, still possibilities. Until a company commits to producing their specialized software (CADD, GIS, etc.) for the Mac, or until there is an increased demand for Macs in such industries, we're still just speculating.
Now, if Apple manages to wedge their way into the server market with a killer Intel-based Xserve coupled with a low-cost Xserve RAID, we may see those pressures come from another side. Time will tell.
Palm actually has an agreement with PalmSource to use the Palm OS in their devices until 2008 (or something close to then). For whatever reason, they didn't see fit to use Cobalt initially, and now that PalmSource has been focusing on Palm-on-Linux middleware, they're probably waiting for that to come out. Apps that run on Cobalt will run on POL, but they'll need a recompile. No sense in making your customers undergo two major OS changes in two years. They're probably also playing it safe since the sale of PalmSource to Access.
In any case, Palm appears to finally be positioning themselves as a device manufacturer that does some value-added stuff to whichever OS they are using. There are rumors floating around that there is Symbian version of the Treo. They're OS strategy seems to be one that will get them the most marketshare in various markets (smartphones and PDAs in the US, smartphones in EU, smartphones in Asia). My hope is that the Palm OS or POL doesn't get lost in the shuffle. I've used Windows Mobile a lot and still find Garnett a more attractive solution for what I need done.
Too bad they are loading it with Netscape 8 and not one of the better designed (graphically) Mozilla projects. It's like they took a book on bad interface design and puked out the GUI.
At least more people will be using the Gecko engine, which should help fight the standards black-hole that is IE.
Lewis Black said it best. . .
"Hurricane Andrew? Why would you call a hurricane Andrew? Did the hurricane show up in a little cravat and a dickie, smelling of polo, sipping of perrier, going "Scurry, scurry, Andy's here!!!" What do they call tornado? Tornado. You get the message. They don't go,"Tornado Timmy's coming, FLEE!" Why, if they're going to give a hurricane a name, give it one that applies, like Hurricane Jesus-Christ-On-A-Crutch! Followed by the next big one, Hurricane Holy-Fucking-Moses!"
We'll see. IBM promised Steve 3 GHz in one year and didn't deliver. They've announced these chips, but give no indication as to when they'll be shipping in quantity. Could be the same as before.
Also, we don't know how compelling the roadmap looks in the future. Apple will get to use these chips in the short term and then switch to Intel by the time these chips have completed their "lives." Steve may be getting what he wants now, but he knows as well as you and I that it is not necessarily an indication of things to come.
My parents still live in what can be considered a "rural" area (only 4 miles from the city, but unreachable by DSL and the cable company has been too lazy). We're frustrated by the lack of broadband options, but recently we ran across the following article.
Frequency grab may air out internet wars
Basically, the guy plans on running a big WiFi transmitter on the unlicensed 2.4 GHz spectrum. How he can run a transmitter at that kind of power (7 mile range) and avoid the FCC is beyond me, but more power to him if he can (no pun intended). I recommend reading the article, as it sounds like a promising concept. I couldn't find any information on his company anywhere on the web aside from some city council minutes, so I'm a bit wary, but hopeful nonetheless. If he succeeds, expect this sort of thing to be rolled out where BPL would otherwise mess with a large portion of the spectrum.
I'm willing to bet it's in Flash because he did the presentation in Keynote. While the SWF export in Keynote isn't great, at least it preserves transitions, fonts, and other formatting options and doesn't look like shit (like the HTML export of another presentation software).
Plus, it takes one step to export. I haven't seen anything that will do that with CSS.
My question is, what sort of neutrality are we seeking here? "All providers of two-way communications." I fail to see how your internet service and your phone service are sufficiently similar. Maybe they should charge Motorola that tax for selling FRS radios. (sarcasm intended)
This is good news to hear. In a way, it confirms what I always suspected (especially since I keep my Macs longer than most of my equivalent PC friends -- and I'm a real gearhead). When you get down to it, though, I don't really care how much marketshare/install base Apple has, so long as they can keep cranking out the excellent products that they do.*
*Please keep in mind that I do realize the connection between profitability and new product development. All I'm saying is that the numbers could mean less as long as I'm a happy customer. And boy am I happy.
Because it won't be a product for very long. Other than for hackers and a few "must have everything" kids, I can't see this succeeding as a product. The number of qualifiers/caveats/limitations of this thing as mentioned in the FAQ are ridiculous. Want to play MP3s? You need to purchase special software. Oh, and the sound quality is limited to 128 K/s, so all those songs you ripped at higher quality won't work. Want to watch movies? Again, special software. To store anything, you'll need an SD or MMC card (not included) to boost the storage past the 32 MB. The game selection is bound to be limited as they are cartridge based and proprietary.
Oh, and one more thing: It's not cool. By the time kids will be able to use it, they'll be old enough to know they want an iPod/GameBoy SP/PSP/DS/etc. and not some childish thing from Mattel.
Exactly. You may lose some sales by making it available over the internet, but most people want to read a book in hand. Reading hundreds of pages at the computer screen is not my idea of fun (or comfort).
Besides, most of these academic presses end up selling books to libraries, who will always have a hard copy on hand in case people do want to read the physical copy. A good example of this can be seen in the academic journals available online. The journals are available in both electronic and hard copy at the same time.
That's because MS moved the site. I'm not sure why, except maybe that they wanted people to know that Terraserver was an MS thing (it's not like they can't fork over the $6 or so a year to renew the domain name).
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
Normally I'm skeptical of the market correcting the mistakes it makes, but this appears to be a case that might prove me wrong. The AOL-Time Warner merger sounded like a good idea on paper, but the two companies were already large enough that integrating their services and products was probably too great a hurdle, especially considering the time-frame under which it took place.
Either that or the combined company was horribly mismanaged.
How is this different from any other OSS project? Two groups see the project going in two different directions and it forks. Granted, the Apple side on this one may not be as open as the KHTML people want, but in all honesty, I'm willing to bet that Apple has a much better code base than KDE at this point. The fact that Apple is suggesting a KDE backport of WebCore is pretty amazing. How many corporations do we see telling an OSS group, "Why don't you just take our code and use it for your project whole-hog"? My guess is not many.
This tool's email address is moskalyuk@gmail.com in case you want to send him some spam of your own.
There's some spammy/spyware like "iWon" thing wrapped in that link. It places a little "iWon" banner at the top of the NYT page, which of course links to some bullshit "iWon" page, which of course probably makes our friend prostoalex a bunch of money.
r s.html?
I'm not sure what else it does as I'm running OmniWeb on my Mac, but Windows users beware.
Clean link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/business/01towe
"I think you mean 39,990,000 years from now." -Me
Someone pointed out an interesting series of relationships in a previous article on the whole Blu-Ray/HD-DVD brouhaha. I don't have a link to it, but I'll summarize"
Apple has now put their weight behind the Blu-Ray standard. That means Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro will support Blu-Ray authoring.
The porn industry uses FCP extensively. If they're anything like print houses (many of whom still use Quark 4.x), they will do anything to avoid changing their workflows. This means sticking with FCP and supporting Blu-Ray in a de facto sort of way.
Blu-Ray is backed by the porn industry.
Blu-Ray wins.
I'm sorry, but we are almost to the point of living too long as it is. There are way, way, way better causes to put that kind of money up for. Besides, the only people who will benefit from this are the very rich, which if you think about it are probably the people who are putting this money up in the first place.
Vain bastards. Thank god most of Africa probably doesn't know about this.